


rêve(r)

by shockdroplet



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Consent Play, Dream Sex, Edging, F/M, Lucid Dreaming, Psychic Bond, Slow Build, Voyeurism, Wet Dream, dubcon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-23
Packaged: 2018-04-01 12:32:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 29,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4019863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shockdroplet/pseuds/shockdroplet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wanda has settled in with the Avengers and happily taken up watching their dreams on the nights she can't catch sleep. For the most part, she finds humor in some of the oddities her teammates dream up. But one particular teammate's dream world eludes her until one night she sees just what androids dream of—knowledge that shakes her waking life to the core. (Scarlet Vision)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. appetence

**{ part one: demiurge }**

 

It was amazing what people dreamt about. Even the most pure and clean-spirited people could have the most explicit fantasies. Wanda had found particular amusement in some of the odd kinks she noticed in Steve's dreams—she would have never pinned him as such a panty guy. Others had far more characteristic dreams. Clint dreamt about a home and a family, a beautiful wife, beautiful children. Clint dreamt about peace and quiet and carving figures out of soft wood blocks moreso than heated fantasies. Natasha's dreams were few and far between, often ill memories it seemed, of a dark place and ballet Wanda took some interest in when she could catch the Widow in a dream state.

Sam dreamt about beautiful women throwing themselves at him—fairly typical of a hot blooded man. He dreamt about confidence and passion and surprisingly enough, he dreamt about Miss Hill. That had surprised Wanda—but then again, seeing Miss Hill in anyone's dreams was a bit of a surprise (outside of the occasional interruption of Steve's panty-filled swimming pool by Hill's barked orders.)

James—or, Rhodey, as he insisted—rarely stayed overnight at their facility. He only had to hear about Wanda's mind invading skill once before deciding, "Alright, I'm out, have a good night guys!" She caught him catching a catnap one afternoon, but not deep enough in slumber to get a glimpse of what he dreamt of. That curiosity intrigued her.

Her latest expedition, however, had been the dream world a certain synthetic man, who so very rarely slept. She wondered if Vision even needed sleep. He probably didn't — she had never even seen him eat. She had spied him drinking tea once or twice, but it seemed to be a taste of curiosity that day.

He had an irritating way of disappearing when the team broke off toward their quarters for a night's rest. It took her weeks to pin his location down and even longer to catch him in sleep and see if he dreamt of electric sheep.

Vision had his own room just as everyone else did, but he very rarely was to be found there. So rarely, in fact, Wanda had temporarily stopped listening for his presence in that direction. But one night, she happened upon that slightly off, slightly inhuman sensation, that electric presence that was as heavy on her mind as the deep humming of a machine.

He was there—he was actually there, in his room. She tried to form a picture of his surroundings from where she was, one floor above. His room was as sterile as the day he had first stepped in, hardly used. He spent much of the time in that room just staring out the window at the city lights over the night sky.

_"The things humans build, they shine and blink like glitter spilled on black velvet. They crave light so lovingly."_

She had overheard his mind's voice musing once. Poignant words that seemed to echo back to her each time she looked out her own window.

A few solemn moments of thought and reflection followed before he laid on the soft bed, wondering to himself what sleep was like for humans—wondering if it were anything like the sleep he experienced. _("A-ha! So he_ _ **does**_ _sleep!")_ Vision took small pleasures in the simplest things, Wanda noted. He enjoyed the cool feeling of clean, fresh sheets on his skin. He enjoyed the way the mattress gave slightly under his weight and even the way the pillow left small lines across his already-intricately-marked face in the mornings.

Vision, she realized, was a slight hedonist for tactile sensations, and of course, it made sense to her the more she dwelled on that revelation. Each nerve in his body was as virginal as he was. He was such an old soul, and yet, almost infantile in the expanse of his wonder for the simple feeling of a doorknob turning in his fingers, or the way hot coffee stung his tongue.

Sleep claimed him, even though he knew he didn't need it. That sensation of drifting, falling, dissolving into slumber was exciting, an  _adventure_.

Wanda waited quietly until she could sense the walls of his mind slip away until only that consciousness, that essense that was so purely  _him_ remained.

As such, his dreams were disjointed recollections in flawless detail, aptly like a machine playing back videos, only she could feel the chilled surface of a glass window, she could smell the salty sweat on the bodies of their teammates fresh out of training sessions. She could taste blood on his tongue when he took a too-hard blow to the face without phasing out soon enough.

Vision dreamt of sensations, primarily, moreso than events, or memories, or people or even thoughts of the future or past.

Wanda must have watched his dreams with fascination for their uniqueness for a month before she noticed the dreams… evolving. She wasn't quite sure what it was that changed at first. Certainly she felt more of the bruising and rush of adrenaline from training sessions, sparring matches, heard more of Steve barking orders at them during field drills. She smelled something familiar, though, something fruity under a salty musk of sweat.

 _"What the hell is it?"_ Wanda thought to herself. It smelled distinctly feminine, familiar, but she couldn't quite tell what it was. The curiosity kept her awake some nights, wondering just what the scent was that Vision kept dreaming about.

At one point, she wondered if it was Natasha's perfume lingering on his mind. The thought came with a spike of… something. Something harsh at the thought of Vision dreaming about Natasha's perfumes.

_"Why does that even bother you? Do you simply want to be special, now?"_

Wanda laughed the thought off. Hardly—she was chasing a rabbit in Vision's mind when she had intended to follow a yellow-brick road.

She dipped into Vision's mind again, another night, after weeks of all but ignoring the slumbering minds of her teammates.

Vision dreamt of training again. Dreamt of levitation. Red flakes of snow falling from the sky and that perfume—she recognized it now, now that she could smell it clearly—it was a mix of a strawberry conditioner, a mix of the scent of hair—her hair product—a mix of the scent of her body after training, the scent of the perfume she had been dabbing on her neck the last few weeks that Natasha had given to her, something a cocktail of citrus Natasha had said was "good for energy… in an aromatherapy sort of way."

As though looking through his eyes, she saw herself.

Herself, back turned to him. Not even realizing he was there.

He stood there a long time, simply watching her.

_"…alright. Unnerving, slightly. But I do know he enjoys observing humans."_

In his dream, he reached out, brushing long fingers across her curled tresses. Each bouncy wave felt like silk. A distinctly new sensation washed over that dream, Wanda noted — an emotion. Want. Want to keep winding his fingers through her hair, a want to bring his fingertips up along her back, across her shoulderblades, across her shoulders — _"…she is so small, but so grand… so…"_ —Wanda jerked out of her concentration, as though she had tripped down a flight of stairs.

She bolted upright in her bed, feeling outright kicked from Vision's dreamspace. Wanda wasn't sure what to make of that feeling… had he realized she was there, watching it all? Of course not. No one knew she was there when she slipped into their mind. Not even Vision could know it. He was no teleptath — perhaps an empath to the highest degree in all irony, but no telepath.

Training that day had been the usual fare. Combat drills, field tactics, sparring with varied members of the team. Vision was as aloof and distracted as ever, looking more interested in the sounds of birds chirping overhead than Steve's description of their training plan for the day.

Wanda kept thinking back to the feeling in Vision's dream, in his fingertips as he reached out for her hair, the electric feeling of  _contact_  that seemed to take some sort of steeled courage. It was only then that she realized the emotion that had veiled the dream had been nerves. Nervousness.

"—and Wanda, I want you and Vision to pair up today, I want to see you two focusing on defensive maneuvers," Steve's voice broke Wanda's thoughts. She snapped back into reality—the afternoon, days after that trek into Vision's dream. Wanda nodded as Vision gave a compliant, "Yes, Sir."

Wanda glanced upward to Vision, who always found his way to a place standing near her. He didn't look her way.

_Nervousness._

"Natasha is going to make the rounds with each of you for CQC—there will be no order. Be ready for a third player to unexpectedly enter your battle. I want to see all of you on your toes, people." Steve said.

His words were quickly losing their command as Wanda continued to eye Vision, thinking back to his _want_  to reach out to her. His ornate blue irises were fixed on Steve with more intensity than Wanda could muster on the most dedicated afternoons.

_Nervousness…?_

A split second—had she blinked, she'd have missed it—Vision glanced her way, but in a fraction of a moment that glance was gone, like a child caught with their hand in a cookie jar.

 _Contact_.

Steve marked their match, each member of the team paired with their sparring partner. Vision only then fixed his sights on her, as mechanical and aloof as ever. Steve called out to begin and they charged, each pair colliding in defensive combat.

Wanda never really enjoyed physical combat training. Natasha was relentless, coming in out of nowhere, zeroing in first on Wanda and flipping the smaller woman onto her back with ease and disappearing into the flurry of metal fists that was Sam and Rhodey. Wanda had gasped to catch the wind knocked out of her, half-thinking to tear Natasha's feet out from under her with a flick of her wrist, but found herself quick to dodge an attack from Vision — she made it clear every time they sparred, "Don't go easy on me, Viszh."

Strikes always went right through him, he phased so easily in and out. But if she was quick enough, she could get a hit in on his side or back, or even block some of his blows.

 _"Don't go easy on me, Viszh."_  She always told him, but she knew just how gentle he always was with her — if he wanted, he could land a fist in her with the density of a diamond. But his landed hits were always so much lighter than even Clint's careful jabs.

"Don't go easy on me…" Wanda said, giving in to the urge to use her powers. She caught his arm in a touchless pull, dragging him down with ease. But the words were lost on Wanda as Vision struck back, she blocked, caught his blow.

 _"Challenge me."_  She thought, as though willing the thought into his mind. Vision seemed to pause at that. In a half second, Wanda thought she saw his lips begin to form a word. Natasha butted in at that inopportune moment. Wanda dodged—Vision had taken the hit, and hard.

The Widow was gone and back on Sam at that moment, leaving Vision and Wanda to their devices—he was down and she could take that round's victory at that moment. She moved for what would have been a lethal blow of wispy, crimson energy, stopping just inches over Vision.

"You didn't try at all, Viszh." Wanda smirked.

Vision stared up at her, silent for a moment, before replying, "Are you sure you are not simply improving, Miss Maximoff?"

She laughed quietly and offered out a hand. He took it, coming up light as a feather. His hand lingered in hers as he settled in a slight levitation over the ground.

"If I let go, are you going to float away?" Wanda glanced at their clasped hands then back up at him. His smile faltered for a minute and he slipped away, hand phasing through hers as he put sudden distance between them.

_Nervousness._

Wanda smiled. He was already fending off the Widow and Sam, who had downed Rhodey. Vision fought his opponents, and she knew it was different when they sparred—he wasn't afraid to hurt them. Wanda caught herself gazing. Watching.

She watched him a great deal that afternoon. Constantly thinking back to his dream, his touch. Their interactions were always minimal — Vision rarely divulged in conversation beyond talk of mission objectives or occasional philosphy with Sam. He was a self-contained universe on the edge of Steve's gravitational pull that kept them all a unit.

That night, she stole away into his dreams again.

Wanda watched from afar as a reflection of herself stood listening to an invisible Steve's orders that slowly faded into the aether.

That statuesque, dreamy hologram of herself, occasionally shifting her weight from one side to another or fiddling with her nails all while Vision stood behind her, watching her, touching her hair and shoulders with a look of curiosity and pleasant wonder. For a split second, she saw a memory flicker through Vision's mind—a memory of walking through the rec room while Sam watched some movie's tender love scene. A memory of the handsome human planting kisses on a beautiful human's neck. She felt the emotion, the  _curiosity_ and  _yearning_.

Brushing her hair aside, Vision slowly leaned in and grazed his lips against her copy's cheek, her jawline. Slow, experimental pecks, trying his best to emulate what he had seen in Sam's movie, as well as going along with what felt… interesting. In Wanda's mouth, she could taste what Vision tasted on her copy's skin—sweetness not unlike the coconut moisturizer she rubbed into her skin each morning, combined with the faintest trace of salt. Getting braver, Vision's arms came up around Wanda's copy, pulling her back against him as he kissed her.

 _"If I let go, are you going to float away?"_  Wanda's copy asked him as he kissed her neck with more intensity. Wanda heard distinctly feminine sighs and quiet moans in the air. Flashes of memories that weren't her own once more, a memory of Sam's romantic film's love scene, of flesh on human flesh, of two bodies grinding in warm shadows.

 _Yearning_ , again.  _Desire_.

"Do you want me to?" Vision asked Wanda's copy, his words hot against her ear, "…float away?"

Wanda watched it all, feeling hot blush rising in her cheeks. It was so surreal, to see herself being held so tenderly, kissed with more and wanton delight each moment.

 _"No… I want… you…"_ Wanda heard breaths from her doppelganger's voice come in response,  _"I want you to stay here, with me."_

He was thinking again back to that film, the sight of those beautiful humans making love—he was tracing more kisses against her neck, imagining Wanda as one of those beautiful humans.

_"Don't let go."_

As if watching a balancing act lose it's equilibrium, Vision's hold on the doppelganger dissolved. He dissolved, fading away and out of sight. His dream was ending. Wanda had been so engrossed in their sensuous scene that she hadn't realized the room around them had disappeared into shadows. Wanda pulled out of his mind as quickly and quietly as she had swept in, returning to her own body to find her face hot and scarlet. That image, those words and  _sensations_ , they were going to be with her all day.

The whole day she craved going back into his dream, sneaking in,  _watching_.

Except, go figure, that night and the following several nights, Vision decided against sleeping. He didn't need sleep like humans did, Wanda knew. He was self-sustaining, it seemed, with metabolic needs only rolling in once in a long while. After enough watching—yes, he did eat, drink, and sleep out of the barest, most minimal necessity. He was more human than she first thought.

Far more than an android of some sort.

Wanda caught herself musing on her observations and couldn't help but chuckle,  _"Since when have I become such a stalker?"_

It took her mind off of Pietro, at the very least.

The amusement faded.

There was a bleak moment, silence in her mind. A silence where Pietro would have cracked a joke. A calm amidst a storm where Pietro would have pulled Wanda into his arms and kissed her head, stroked her hair, told her that things would be alright.

It would be another week before she managed to catch Vision allowing himself the luxury of sleep. She followed his mind and thoughts down that descent into slumber, eager for what evolution his dreams would take after such time had passed. 


	2. intoxicate

Had Pietro been around, Wanda would have sought his advice. She knew exactly how it would have went — it hadn't been the first time she'd glimpsed into the mind of a boy with a crush on her. Pietro would have told her, "Well, it's going to be awkward now, knowing what he thinks of you when you're queued up for lunch or something. Try not to let him know you can do this, sister, it'll just be a world of pain letting anyone in who couldn't possibly understand."

Or, perhaps, it could have been advice tinged with Pietro's telltale jealousy, "He's not worth your presence in his dreams anyway. Boys are only after one thing, Wanda, don't get suckered in by the sweet talk."

Vision wasn't a boy, though.

Not the teenage boys from Sokovia whom Wanda had cautiously experimented with, both in mind and body — may Pietro forgive her one day for the lies she spun to steal moments away with a boyfriend here and there. Relationships were always so short-lived. They were always, always running. She learned early in life not to get attached.

The only constant in her life was and always would be Pietro.

Except now, it wasn't.

Now, these Avengers, these kind people fighting on the side of life, these were her family. They were her new constant.

And she was all of too afraid to become attached to any one of them just to be stripped of them as she had been of her brother.

" _Training is going to become awkward, knowing the way he wants to kiss you. Knowing how he probably thinks of you every time he remembers that smut he saw on the television."_ Pietro would have told her. Sometimes Wanda was so sure Pietro was still there in her mind, his voice jutting in with cautionary advice against trusting Vision's increasingly evident crush.

Training passed day by day. It was increasingly difficult not to linger on the sensation of their touch, of their sparring, of the feeling where their bodies collided in practiced conflict. It was becoming impossible not to notice how quickly Vision came to her side, even from across the training field it seemed, when she as much as fell or tripped over a moment of clumsiness or a blow from Natasha that had all but leveled her.

It was hard not to crave the memorized sound of his breaths when he stood behind her. He was always gone when she turned—but she amusedly knew she wasn't imagining things.

"He talks about you a lot, you know," Clint said once, a stun-based arrow fixed on Vision. Wanda kept careful watch over her teammate, playing sentinel to Clint's sniper.

"Who?"

Clint chuckled, "You know who. Big Red.  _El luchador roja mística._  Tell me I'm not the only one who thinks he looks like a luchador, by the way."

Wanda laughed quietly and shook her head, "I don't even know what that is."

"Ah, whatever. He watches out for you. Always has. Even on the first day. Heads up, but I think our android friend has a crush." Clint said, drawing the arrow back.

Wanda was well aware of this already, thinking back to the tender caresses Vision stole from her doppelganger. She wasn't sure how much she wanted to prod this sleeping  _thing_. Curiosity was welling within her. But after Pietro, Wanda mused, she wasn't sure just how close she wanted to get to anyone again. Not even that blissfully romantic "robot" as others called him.

"Leave him to his dreams," Wanda answered, "There are more important things at stake."

Releasing the arrow, Clint glanced back to Wanda over his shoulder. She heard Sam shriek from somewhere below—"nailed me in the ass!"—a blunt tip that would leave him incapacitated with one hell of a dead leg for a time.

"You're a tougher cookie than I thought, kid." Clint said.

Wanda didn't answer, still keeping her eyes out for any trace of their opponents finding their location. Clint gathered his things to move to their next point and Wanda followed.

"Y'know, we live the kind of lives that… honestly, kid, could end at any moment. We live in the moment. The moment's all we got. I mean…" Clint paused as they passed a window in the derelict building they crossed through. He gestured out to Vision far out in the field caught in battle with Steve and assisting soldiers on Steve's "blue team." Clint made a motion with his hand that Wanda couldn't quite translate.

"I mean… he's… all muscley and kind of. I dunno, that thing you young women are into these days. A little sunburnt, maybe, but… y'know, he's… ah, nevermind, don't let me meddle, here. I've been listening to Vision and Nat talking about existentialism and weird romanticism too long." Clint shrugged and continued leading the way.

Wanda simply laughed, "…does he really talk about me that much?"

"He doesn't shut up about you, kid."

"He's nice, but a little young for me." Wanda replied.

Clint laughed.

She spent the rest of that afternoon quietly probing Clint's memories for what he overhead Natasha and Vision discussing. She was pleasantly surprised at how accurate Clint was in saying,  _"He doesn't shut up about you."_

They were well into autumn by this time since their coming together.

_May, June, July…_

She had known this new family for a little over five months now. Time really did move quickly during times of peace intermingled with occasional missions here and there. After Sokovia, the tasks the Avengers took on felt more like glorified delivery services or babysitting important heads in transit. For the first time, she really felt she could begin closing the distance she had placed between herself and the others.

With the end of October in New York, Wanda was reminded that Halloween was a thing in the states. Holidays like that were often forgotten in Sokovia—and scarcely remembered by Wanda, who hadn't the time to think about festivities or holidays since the time her family was alive. The team had settled into the Avengers Tower back in the city for that weekend. Life couldn't all be training and stress testing, Steve had said.

"Alright kids, Uncle Tony's going to show you guys how to party like Avengers." Stark had announced on Saturday evening.

A Halloween party.

It almost felt juvenile to think of. Such luxuries were so far out of her past life that she wasn't sure  _how_ to settle in with the team like a normal human.

But the team took up the challenge with childlike eagerness. No matter how old anyone was, taking up costumes for fun was a delight, Sam had told her after coming out of his quarters with a cheap and frilly mardi gras mask. Even Natasha had stepped out in a very American, 1940s ensemble, complete with a small hat and black, veil of netted fabric hiding her face, and a long cigarette holder pursed between her lips.

"Who are you supposed to be?" Clint had asked her.

"Janet Snakehole. A very rich widow with a terrible secret." Natasha answered. There was a reference there that was lost on Wanda.

Vision was nowhere to be seen in the hours leading up to the party.

Wanda had thought to spend the evening relaxing in her quarters with books rather than deafen herself in the music and overflow of partygoers' thoughts. It was only when she had made her way through the halls, into an elevator that she was stopped by a particular costume.

The elevator had opened to a man she had never seen before. Tall, blonde, with angular features and a terribly casual suit. Wanda stepped into the elevator without a second thought, pressing the button for her floor and settling into the silence. When the elevator moved, she made a double take at the man beside her.

"…Viszh?"

"Yes?" Vision's voice came.

Another look and Wanda felt foolish for not recognizing his face sooner.

Gone was the scarlet skin and intricate patterns webbing his face. The infinity stone was hidden under a ballcap and his eyes were hidden under a pair of aviator sunglasses. Wanda looked him over once again and began to grin, laughing quietly, "…you're…"

She took in the sight and irony of it all — a synethetic man going to a halloween party as a human.

"You're dressed like a tourist…" Wanda laughed.

Still staring at her, without reaction, Vision's clothes seemed to blur and reform into something else. The sort of suit she had seen Tony wearing once. Far too formal to match the baseball cap and glasses.

"Will this suffice?"

Wanda shook her head, her face still stuck in a warm smile, "It was fine… it's a costume. There are no rules."

"No rules." Vision repeated, before the changing act happened again. In the blink of an eye he wore Steve's blue and star-spangled suit.

Wanda was again amused by this and sighed, "He… might make you change. But for what it's worth… it looks better on you."

The elevator came to a stop on a floor between their beginning and her destination. The doors opened to Maria Hill and Dr. Cho discussing something of clearly the utmost importance. Cho stopped when she saw Vision not just with very human skin, but donning the suit of Captain America.

"…Vision?" Cho said, startled.

"Oh, Steve is going to love that." Maria laughed.

"This is far too much attention." Vision said quickly, pressing hard, a random button and bringing the doors to a close before the women entered. Again, the elevator was moving, with just the two of them.

Wanda had never seen Vision react so quickly, so…  _sheepishly_. So he got shy here and there after all. As he pulled his hand back from the panel, his suit once again changed back to the casual set Wanda had walked in on. Curiosity was getting to her—he kept the hat and sunglasses throughout it all (even over Captain America's mask) and she wondered if he was unable to disguise the infinity stone, or the unique patterns in his irises.

As she leaned closer, trying to get a better look, she took note of the way Vision's fair skin began to take on a more scarlet hue, starting at the ears.

_Is he blushing?_

"It's alright. I never liked when too many people put their attention on me, either."

"…it's… normal, right?"

Wanda shrugged, "As normal as we could possibly be."

A smile crept on Vision's face as he looked her way. Gentle, grateful. Reassured.

"Will you be there? At this party…" Vision asked.

Although Wanda had hardly planned on it, she got the sense that he would find comfort in her presnce. So she nodded and answered, "I will."

With a relieved breath, Vision's smile became more confident, "It may not be so awful, then, Miss Maximoff."

They reached the main lounge floor. Vision's stop. Wanda decided it would be her stop, as well.

Stark pulled out all the stops with his partying—good music, costumed guests, expensive drinks and food. She kept to the outskirts of the festivities, preferring not to be at the epicenter of such a loud web of drunk minds.

"It's the first time we've all really gotten together like this since before, y'know… Ultron." Clint had said to her at one point. Wanda watched Clint keep his careful eyes on Natasha as he continued, "We're missing someone."

Wanda was never on the best terms with Banner. While she understood the team's attachment and concern for him, she hadn't known him and still didn't care to know him or know  _of_  him. Things were peaceful. Clint snuck away toward Natasha, meeting her at the bar amidst the small sea of partiers.

Wanda snuck across the edges of the party, choosing a quiet place at a balcony and watching the city lights instead. Her mind was wandering back to Vision, to the way he levitated and observed the city lights in his first moments of existence. She saw only minor beauty in the cityscape. Whatever it was he saw entranced him. She had yet to quite understand Vision's fascination with man.

Glancing back into the party, she watched him converse easily among their teammates. He smiled easily, joked often. He was all dry wit and scathing intellect when she watched him converse from afar. There were times he  _did_ remind her of his progenitor, Ultron, in how quick their minds worked. As prone to poetics as Vision was (not unlike Thor) she had caught him throwing some brutal banter over the comm during missions — he said things that could make people laugh. Things that could make her laugh.

He turned her way, as though he knew right where she stood, a whole room and sea of bodies away.

For a beat, she did not hear the banter and chatter of guests. She did not hear the music. Nor did Wanda see the flashing lights over on the small dance floor set up in the lounge suite. There was only Vision, there in his human skin, his costume. His gaze fixed unwaveringly on her, and she on him. She thought back to his touch from the dreams, his fascination with the waves of her hair. The sound of his breath shivering under a pounding heart.

In a moment, his attention was pulled away, Tony throwing an arm around him (as best he could, being so much shorter than Vision) and leading him away. Wanda felt herself frown, ever so slightly. She remained outside a while longer, until the guests cleared out and the party's numbers fell down to those she knew. When she stepped into the suite, she was met with the sound of her teammate's laughter. Stories shared, recalling the "shit talking" over the comm during missions, and a particularly riveting story about Clint and Natasha escorting an agent in Bolivia only to find out that said agent had been one of Maria's own, putting them through a sort of examination the entire time.

Vision had fallen quiet through it all, always choosing more to listen to others' stories and drinking in their experiences. He sat alone near the edge of the team's circle, somewhere between Rhodey and Natasha.

Natasha watched Wanda step in and with a nod of her head, motioned for Wanda to "come here." Wanda glimpsed the proximity to Vision and hesitantly made her way to Natasha's side. Wanda listened to Natasha's commentary of Clint's "awful storytelling" pointing out where "it wasn't like that at all" but still laughing at their fond shared moments.

The team laughed together, drank together—she even watched Clint and Tony engage Vision in a "shot battle" that seemed to have no effect on their opponent. Yet despite it all, Wanda still watched from the outside. Parties drained her. She wanted nothing more than the comfort of a soft bed and the embrace of sleep.

She excused herself quietly, ready to turn in for the night, she said. The team bid her a good night—drunken, "Bye Wanda," "G'night, Wanda," "Nighty, sweetheart," "Night, kid!", "Bye, Felicia," "TONY."

It was when she made her way through the building's long corridors that she sensed another familiar, all too welcome presence.

"…Viszh?" Wanda stopped, finally, looking around.

Vision made his entrance into the hallway, phasing clumsily through a wall and stumbling for balance. She reached out, catching him as he straightened up.

"Viszh, are you alright?"

"I-I'm quite alright, thank you, Miss Maximoff. I… I felt rude letting you see yourself off alone like this." Vision answered, the faintest trace of a slur in his words. Wanda eyed him for a moment before soft laughter followed. Tony had gotten Vision drunk.

"Viszh… I'm alright. But I'm not sure you're alright. You've never had alcohol before, have you?" Wanda said.

Vision's motions were fluid as he leaned and looked elseward and then back to her, actually laughing, "No, no I haven't. I have… have not. It is fascinating. I feel quite wonderful, although occasionally I cranberry the wrong word for some reason."

Wanda quirked an eyebrow, "What?"

"Did I… did I do it again?"

"You need to sleep it off." Wanda said, finding herself leading the way. Vision followed with a few steps before suddenly dropping through the floor for a moment—but quickly steadying himself back up to Wanda's side. Wanda laughed it off with a tired sigh. It almost reminded her of the times she guided a drunken Pietro home from the bar. She had missed holding a warm, comfortably drunk body beside her, trusting each other, leading the way. She missed Pietro.

She lead Vision to his room—it was the first time she had set foot there, and yet it was as familiar as a second home to her after so many weeks of hiding in his dreams and mind. Everything about it was so very clean and untouched, save for a growing collection of books on the shelves, the desk and an endtable. She marveled at just how many books he had accumulated for a moment and then guided Vision's cumbersome, wiry body onto his bed.

"There. Now try not to phase through your bed and wake up downstairs, Viszh." Wanda said. She hesitated before turning to take her leave.

Vision's hand rose up to Wanda's arm, a gentle touch she hadn't realized she craved. She put a hand over his and patted it gently, "Get some sleep."

"Will I dream? If I slept like this?" Vision asked.

Wanda made a shrugging motion, "Perhaps… sometimes I dream when I pass out drunk… sometimes I don't. Sometimes I wake up with a headache."

"I've never slept… without dreaming. I-I'm a bit afraid of that. I've… never truly been unconscious before in that sense. Even closing my eyes, there was always… always  _something_. Now I simply fear I've poisoned myself."

Wanda laughed. Vision watched her, a cautious, but confused-looking smile in response, before he chuckled in uncertainty.

"What…?" Vision asked.

"You are making too big of a fuss. There is no need to be afraid of a little alcohol… you'll be fine… you're just a little drunk." Wanda reached up, taking off the baseball cap and tossing it aside. She gently removed the sunglasses he'd somehow managed to wear all evening.

Despite his wispy blonde hair, the infinity stone was still very much there on his forehead, unable to be hidden no matter Vision's efforts. His eyes, gazing up at her with dewy, childlike wonder, were the same blue, carved with intricate patterns. His human disguise was quite breathtaking, Wanda mused, looking over his features as he fixed his gaze on her own.

But she found herself very much missing the scarlet skin and all it's designs, the muscle tissue-like stretches of flesh intermingled with a vibranium exoskeleton. She was thinking back on his bare form she had first seen, the very moment they met. How afraid of him she had been back then—how much she missed his unearthly form when presented with such an unsuspecting-looking man.

"You going to sleep in that thing?" Wanda asked playfully.

"Wha…?" Vision replied, before realizing what she meant, "…oh… Oh, right."

In an instant, his skin and features faded back to the crimson Wanda remembered.

Perhaps in his mild stupor, he hadn't meant to take  _it all off_ , however… he did. Wanda kept her face straight as she tried her damnedest not to look down.

" _…Yep, he just got naked…"_  Wanda thought, unsure if there was a hint of irritation with how inopportune his drunkeness was or with her own sudden overwhelming shyness.

Doing her best to focus on his sleepy eyes, Wanda stroked his face lovingly, the way she always had for Pietro as he drifted off into drunk slumber.

" _Don't look at it, don't look at it, that's incredibly rude, don't look at it."_  Her superego drilled—unabashedly, there was the faintest trace of id in her mind answering,  _"I want to look."_

"Go to sleep, you idiot." Wanda gave Vision a gentle push and he fell backward onto his bed, falling easily into sleep. She snuck out quickly, trying her best to brush off what she had very nearly glimpsed, continuing to chastise herself—it was  _rude_.

At least he was safely asleep and in his own bed.

Once she reached her own, bed, Wanda mused, she could continue to keep an eye on him. Just in case he didn't dream. Or in case he dreamt too much.

The latter wound up being the case. The presence of his dreaming state was like a psychic pulse only she could hear—if it had been a sound, it'd have been deafening. His mind had let go of all it's order and all of his mind's walls seemed to dissolve in his drunken fugue. When he dreamt through his intoxication, he dreamt in vivid, lucid form. Wanda saw all of their recent surroundings take form around her. His dreams were no longer just fleeting sensations and memorized sounds and scents. His dreams were becoming worlds crafted with far more craftsmanship than the dreams of any other human mind she'd slinked around in.

_"I am here."_

She sensed, she felt his voice forming those words, like many echoes from all around her, coming together at some epicenter in his dream world.

"Lucid dreaming is a thing some people try to do," Dr. Cho's voice came—the woman phased right through Wanda, walking through what quickly became her office as she took a seat at her desk, "Although from my understanding, it's something like hypnosis. People have to be willing to give up some semblance of control over their mind to let someone else in. From that, I've always assessed that a person who enacts too much control might actually find it difficult to reach the relaxation necessary for a lucid dream state."

Cho stopped to take a sip of her tea, before moving on to the documents she had stepped in with. Wanda thought she could hear Vision's voice, although it was distant, muffled, too muffled for her to hear or make out. Cho smiled and gave answer to whatever Vision had said.

"You have to think about an anchor, a center point. From what I understand—and lucid dreaming is something of a fringe science in my opinion, so take what I say with a grain of salt—lucid dreaming gives the dreamer control over the happenings, the contents, the length of their dreams." Cho explained, whilst sifting through paperwork. She looked up in Wanda's direction, seeing Vision, of course, "What is with your sudden interest in lucid dreaming, anyway? If I may ask. Romanoff mentioned to me that you've been asking her a lot about it since she brought it up."

"Dreaming… dreaming is so short and so fleeting," Wanda heard Vision's muffled voice, but she looked around, unable to find him anywhere. "…so very new to me. …fascinated by i… but it ends so quickly."

"Most dreams are short in nature. REM sleep actually has quite the duration, at least in the typical human brain. It comes and goes throughout the night. Tell me, you aren't having any disturbances in your sleep, any nightmares?"

"Far from it, Dr. Cho… the dreams are wonderful."

"I take it you don't simply dream about flying?" Dr. Cho asked with a smile.

"No… Feeling…"

Dr. Cho nodded, a look of some understanding on her face, as though Vision's answer made perfect sense, though she could not quite elaborate on it.

Wanda heard voices outside of Dr. Cho's office. Just outside the door. Steve's marching songs. Jogging. Wanda made her way toward the door, glancing back at Cho and the empty seat in front of her desk. She continued to speak in technicalities, "So you're sleeping once every 120 hours, then?"

Cho's voice was of less interest to Wanda as she opened the door. The indoor training hall, empty, though filled with the sound of their team sparring. Of Sam's jokes, of Rhodey's quips, Natasha's battle cries and Steve's orders. The scent of earth, of soil, grass, the faintest breeze coming in though the hall was sealed off. Birds in the sky, chirping. Wanda stepped into the hall, thinking to just turn back for Cho's office—but the door through which she had come was gone.

"Don't go easy on me, Viszh." Wanda heard her own voice—all others silenced. She hadn't spoken. She looked around, still very much alone in the training hall. She thought to speak up, but wouldn't dare make herself be known in his sleeping mind.

Not when all she wanted was to watch and see what happened.

"Don't go easy on me, Viszh." She heard her voice again, before the training hall faded away to the empty lounge suite, still a mess from the party, but dimmed with the glow of stringed lights hanging along the walls and across the high cieling.

Wanda felt a hand on her back and jumped, surprised at how  _there_  she physically felt. She bolted around, seeing Vision, his human "costume" under soft amber light. He had no reaction to her spinning around to face him. Instead he continued to watch her, in a trance, stroking her hair, running long, crimson fingers through her wavy locks. Wanda's heart was pounding in her chest. He was  _touching_ her, albeit gently, but… no one in their dreams had made contact with her in a way she could  _feel_.

She heard his breaths, slow and quiet. He twirled one long chestnut strand around his fingers and then traced a line across her collar bone, moving inward this time, toward her chest, toward her heart. His fingertips stopped, lingering over her heart, beating hard within her chest like a heavy drum. Electric butterflies seemed to rise up in her belly, her chest, rising from her core as she felt a rush of curiosity and something new entirely.

Wanda kept her eyes fixed on Vision, though he appeared more intrigued by her heartbeat. Only then did his eyes meet hers. Did he know she was actually there? Wanda thought to speak, but was still so terribly afraid of shattering his comfortable illusion of a dream, of revealing to him that she was actually _there_ , intruding on his most private thoughts. She felt so utterly  _caught_  in that moment, though she sensed in his forward touches that he thought her to be just a creation of his unconscious thoughts.

His touch moved back upward again, along the curve of her neck and hesitantly, rising up along her jawline, across the soft of her cheeks before dipping back through her hair. Wanda let her eyes shut at his gentle caressing. No one but Pietro had such a calming effect on her.

_This is so much different than Pietro, though._

It somehow didn't surprise her that his skin felt warm and  _human_. Indistinguishable from Pietro's caresses.

Curiosity getting the better of her, she reached up and placed her hand over his as he cupped her face. Knuckles, soft, thick veins pumping with blood not unlike her own. Hot blooded, skin just slightly dry — not as dewy and perfect as the day she first laid eyes on him.

"Would you… want me if I looked this way? Looked… human?" Vision's voice came, breaking Wanda's reverie.

She opened her eyes when she realized his roaming touch had stopped. Emotion began to spill over her again, just like last time — a waterfall of it. Anxiety, nervousness, she sensed the want for him to pull away from her,  _like fear_ , moments before she caught the tremble in his hand.

"You look at me… just as they do. Acknowledging that I am different. Recognizing me as if I were… as if I were a monster." Vision said, his brow furrowing, "I… I believe I frighten you…"

 _"You're losing him, you're waking him up, you fool!"_  Wanda thought, caught in prismatic, inhuman blue eyes wrought with rising anguish.

"You are the last one I would have frightened of me… Wanda."

_"Hurry up and do something, anything!"_

Anything.

Wanda leaned up on her toes to reach, and kissed him.

Vision was stilled by this at first, taken aback by such an unexpected motion from the once-docile doppelganger. Her lips brushed against his—they were both soft and dry, with a taste she could only describe as that of electricity, if it had a certain taste. His lips were so still, yet slowly parted, letting her in, letting her press forward. She felt his arms come up around her waist, holding her, bringing her body closer to his. Wanda heard his voice against her tongue, a soft moan riding a trembling breath.

She felt his tongue and she felt heat. That wash of emotion eased out of cold nervousness and faded into warm, welcoming want.

Wanda's fingers stroked his face gently, just as she did before she pushed him onto his bed earlier in the evening. She finally spoke, her lips moving against his uncertain, almost-stilled kiss.

"Take off this silly costume, Viszh… I want to kiss  _you_."

Vision gazed down at her, his breaths light, his mind visibly on a cloud. He was drunk on her touch and taste, on her every word, it seemed. "…of course."

The inviting human form faded away again, leaving only the scarlet form of sinew and bone structure carved out of vibranium plates. The lights around them had moved slowly into a blur, into the dull glow cast by the lights in Vision's room. In the time her eyes shut and opened again in a blink, he was laying back against his sheets, resuming his moment of nakedness, beneath her now, slowly drawing her closer.


	3. annihilate

Each sensation he felt, she shared, each shaking breath he took, she breathed—all constant reminders that she was in his dream. At one point, a spectator, at another, a participant, and now, in the tangle of his touch, Wanda had become Vision’s sensory doppelganger. Soft, silken sheets under their bodies felt like a comfortable, cool embrace against the heat that radiated under scarlet flesh. Vision’s lips moved against her own with greater intensity, growing braver with each brush of their tongues. Wanda returned each kiss with fervor, their curiosity shared. Vision had guided her into the sheets, onto her back, kissing a slow path across her collarbone and grazing his lips across her clothed breast.

Graceful fingers unbuttoned her top—a slow tease, starting from the bottom, an action intermingled with a warm palm sliding over her body. Wanda could feel her own skin through his sensations, even the slight hardening of her nipple as his fingers brushed across. It had all been so much to _feel_ that she was certain she was going to simply fall out of the dream entirely into a half-awake state of overheated, lonely frustration. Everything was becoming a blur under these distracting caresses—a glance over his shoulder and she saw their surroundings becoming more like a haze than solid shapes. Wanda shut her eyes, intensifying her focus on _him_.

 _“Don’t lose this…”_ She thought to herself, _“Feel what you feel, not what Viszh feels,”_ she chided, unwilling to let this moment slip away.

A gasp escaped her when his mouth, warm and wet, closed over her nipple, she felt his tongue—tasting her skin—and a moan escaped her, carrying his name. When his tongue left her breast, the cold air stung light at her flesh. Wanda caught his lips against her own, shifting her weight atop him, tasting her skin on his lips. Perhaps moving so suddenly had been a mistake—she felt, surely, that the dream world around them would collapse entirely and she would fall into some kind of dizzy, intoxicated abyss.  

Her fingertips brushed down across his body, gracing a ghostlike touch across his length until her index finger stopped playfully over the tip. Vision very definitely had a heartbeat like a human man—she could feel it racing, she could feel his nerves firing with unfamiliar pleasures. _Touch me, please, touch me more—_ Wanda could sense these thoughts in his mind, these _needs_ as her palm closed around his length, stroking with a soft rhythm. His chest hitched up in a slow, deep breath and somewhere in there, she could hear the softest hint of his voice like a gentle purr— _don’t stop—_ Wanda’s lips curled into a smile.

She kissed downward, across his chest, finally taking in the beautiful sight of him for the first time since the moment they met. It felt like an eternity since then, and her dreams certainly had never done him justice. She had forgotten just how much of his torso went from scarlet flesh and muscle to vibranium exoskeleton, how the lines carving patterns along his abdomen and past his navel reminded her of circuitry. They were like nerves to him, these lines, branching off into tinier, microscopic threads that wove across his body, feeding each tactile sensation he’d come to crave.

Curious, Wanda eyed him as she chose one line beside his navel and kissed along it. To her amusement, he sucked in a breath—in unison, as did she—and she felt the swirling, light-headed rush she was giving him when the tip of her tongue traced a warm, wet trail along this line. It was her turn to taste his skin, something electric, something vaguely metallic in nature. Downward Wanda’s tongue moved, she could feel a ghost of this intense sensation along her own lower belly. Feathering soft kisses to the tip of his length, she took him fully, reveling in the ghost sensation of heat and warmth stirring between her own legs.

His breaths were hypnotic to her, the sound drawing her in like a lullaby. At some point, one hand had reached for hers, clasping their fingers together, holding tight. Vision sighed something incoherent when her tongue moved against his shaft in time to the rise and fall of her lips. Again, there was the lustful trace of pleasure heating up in her core, enough to make her moan—and oh, how she hadn’t realized just how good it felt to feel the voice’s vibrations against such a sensitive place!—but it was a mere tease to her, given the differences in their anatomy.  

Her initial, shy curiosity had given way to salacious experimentation as his sense of need intensified with each dip of her tongue. How far could she push this virginal, glistening red test subject? How much of his release would she feel? How wonderful would he taste? He still did not even know she was a far cry from his dream-crafted doppelganger—and for a brief second, Wanda felt guilt for this, but that second passed quickly.

Wanda sat up, straddling Vision’s hips and gazing down at his body, admiring the rise and fall of his chest. Scarlet, carved less like a man and more like some terrifying god, oh, he was so very perfect. He opened his eyes and gazed up at her, eyes filled with similar fascination. His mind had sobered, and yet, Wanda sensed he was still swimming in a haze of lust and liquor.

“Viszh…” Wanda’s lips were again curling into a smile as his hands grazed across her knees, her thighs, under her skirt—the only article of clothing left between them. All it took was an unclasping of a few buttons in the back to tug it off and toss it aside.

Vision’s lips parted as though to speak, but she heard in her mind, only silence. Not a wall, but rather, a chasm between what he felt and a lack of words. She heard his mind sifting through several different languages, adjectives, turns of phrase, but it ended with only— _undefined._

She could not help but let a playful giggle escape her, no matter how hard she tried. At least, she felt warmth from within him, comfort at the sight of her smile, at the sight of her body— _beautiful, stars, lights: association—_ sitting atop him and her slender wrists, her hand covering her smiling lips— _crescent moon, goddess, selene: association_ —the words were coming now, even though he did not speak— _Wanda, desire, love—_

“…love?” Wanda murmured, the word sobering her.

“I…” Vision began, before hesitating. He glanced sideward, and before Wanda could say another word, he scooped an arm around her waist and pulled her beneath him. Another kiss followed, fierier than the last. He kissed with desperation, as Wanda realized that the room around them was beginning to blur and fade.

 “Viszh!” Wanda breathed between kisses, the sense that their time was up dawning on her with painful revelation.

The last thing she saw was his face, eyes closed, lips parted—mesmerizing. The last thing she felt was his body, large and warm over her, pulling her close. She heard him sigh her name, one hand on her thigh, their bodies touching as though to end that bothersome ache between them, “Wanda, stay with me…”

Then darkness.

There was the brief sensation of falling, and then Wanda awoke.

Blinking once, then twice, she saw sunlight washing in through a break in the blinds shielding her window. Wanda bolted upright in her bed, frustratingly fully-clothed. Her head held a dull ache and her sight, a slight spin, as though she’d somehow picked up on… a hangover?

Wanda rubbed at her temple, wincing and craving only water. Definitely a hangover, but she hadn’t even drunk much the night before…

The realization hit her a second, clearer time, and her eyes widened, “Viszh…!”

It must have been fifteen past six in the morning. As evident from the quiet of Stark Tower, her fellow Avengers were probably still sleeping off their own hangovers. Wanda could sense strong dream activity from the lot of them. Yes, all of them, definitely still asleep. Dreaming loudly, she followed the confusing mess of sounds and sensations coming from Vision’s room. She stopped outside his door, wondering if it’d have been terribly awkward to check on him.

Her hand hovered over his door, second guessing a knock for the better.

The noisy dreaming coming from him, that cacophony of his voice speaking so many things that it was like listening to a tangled bramble of equations, it all came to a sudden stop. Wanda’s stomach dropped a bit, finally disconnected from him for the first time in hours. Suddenly, she could not feel what he felt, hear what he heard, it was as if he…

“Aaaugh…”

Wanda tilted her head to the side… was that him?

She heard a loud thump—almost a groan of metal straining, bending. It sounded like he’d fallen out of bed and nearly taken out his bedroom floor in the process.

“Aaah…” Another zombie’s cry in Vision’s voice followed.

When she heard scraping, Wanda made to knock gently at the door, “Hey… Viszh? Are you alr—”

Wanda saw the first gold flickerings of his outline phasing through the door. She stepped aside as he half-stumbled through the door like a hologram, wearing an odd mix of his combat suit (at least the top of it, sans cape) and what looked like an emulation of Tony’s track suit pants. He nearly phased through the floor before he caught himself. It was only a brief glimpse of Vision before he stumbled into another wall, phasing through it and out of sight.

Perhaps, she figured, he could use some space.

She found him later just past Tony’s gym floor, in some sort of communal shower that the entrepreneur had constructed lavishly for himself. Wanda wasn’t sure how much medicine for human consumption would help a synthetic man, but nonetheless, she procured water and pain relievers for the hungover android. Outside the showers, Wanda called out to him.

“You looked pretty bad up there, Viszh. I don’t know how much it’ll help, but I brought you some medicine for that hangover.”

There was silence for a long while, only the drum of water from the shower, before Vision’s voice came, rather weak and miserable, “M-Miss Maximoff… what have I done? This is truly the end of my mortal existence… long before I even understood my own mortality, I’ve squandered it away.”

It was a bit dramatic, in it’s pathetic, slightly theatric way. Wanda could remember her first horrible hangover, though, and grinned. When she recalled the many times she had to nurse a hung over Pietro back to health, that grin became something of a soft laugh. Vision may have been about as dramatic as Pietro was, she mused.

“I have brought about my own end.”

“…Viszh, you’re ridiculous.”

Wanda gave it a moment of thought before deciding to venture into the shower and its soft wall of steam. Announcing her presence, as not to startle him, she said, “You’re alright. You’ve just got a hangover. It’ll pass.”

Perhaps she’d have found the sight of Vision a touch more amusing, had it not been so haunting.

He stood in the stream, leaning with his head pressed against the wall, arms hugging tight around his shoulders. Through the steam, Wanda felt the ghost of a memory in Vision’s silhouette. A figure like Pietro, huddled in the shower, head to the wall, just as Pietro used to do when his head pounded in fever or hangover.

Wanda placed the medicine and the glass nearby, doing her best not to let her gaze linger on his broad shoulders, the muscles defined in his crimson and vibranium back.

“Would you like me to stay with you?”

_—Stay with me—_

Wanda wasn’t sure if she had imagined him answering her or not. For a beat, she felt a wave of spinning dizziness and a skull-splitting migraine. It was momentary, but it was enough to make her silently double over and catch her balance against a wall.

“Stay… stay with me…” Vision finally spoke.

This was odd… that link was not voluntary, momentary or not.

Wanda stayed, but there was no further breach. She waited a small distance away, but not for terribly long. The shower’s stream came to a halt and Vision’s quiet, spectral form floated past her with slouched shoulders and head hung low. It seemed as though his default clothing had returned, that capeless variant of his teal suit (at least, this time, with the proper pants.) Vision still seemed to lull and sway, even while floating. Wanda offered the medicine and water.

“You think it will help?” Wanda asked him. Vision took the tablets and drank the water with one gulp.

 “I suppose I will find out… until last night, I did not even know consuming alcohol would have any effect on my system,” His eyes rose to gaze off into space as he added, “I… feel intoxicated, still.”

“You’ll live. Let’s get you back to your room. Sleep it off.” Wanda said, slipping an arm around him. His body felt strange, almost plush, soft, as though he were subtly fading in and out of a solid state. As Wanda guided him back toward his room, she realized that if she pushed him too hard, she could have very likely slipped right through him. By the time they reached Vision’s room, his feet were starting to dissolve down into the floor. They were nearly the same height by the time she got him to tumble back into bed.

As she had suspected earlier, there was a distinct, Vision-shaped crater in the floor that Tony was probably not going to be thrilled with. The marble flooring was cracked through to its base. The metal groan she had heard, perhaps may have very well been the steel beams under the floor straining under Vision’s unstable mass. 

Sitting at his bedside, Wanda realized he was watching her, unblinking.

“Need any more water?” Wanda’s voice was quiet, gentle. He was huddled on his side, staring up at her like a wide-eyed kid. She reached out on instinct, stroking his cheek. Vision’s eyes shut, she could hear a soft breath.

“It is alright, Miss Maximoff. Thank you.”

“Hang in there. You very well might be this team’s vodka champion.” Wanda grinned, “Sleep, champion.”

Vision gave an exhausted smile, and she caught the faint trace of a tired laugh.

“I never want to drink it again. This truly feels like death.”

“I won’t let you die.” Wanda said, “…would you like me to stay?”

His eyes flit open, once more fixed on her. She felt a sense of recognition behind his eyes. Wanda wondered if Vision even remembered that dream they shared. He still did not know she was aware of it all. Heaven forbid he find out, Wanda thought with some regret. She imagined that he would probably be mortified.

At least, in spite of unusual circumstance… she wanted to remain at his side.

“Please.” Vision said.

Wanda gave a warm smile in answer. She climbed into the blankets beside him, previously unaware of the slight trembling under his skin. Was he shaking? His skin was not the radiating heat she remembered from the night before. It was neither warm, nor was it cold. It was just… a strange, dead sort of room temperature that Wanda found a bit unsettling.

 She was happy to fall back asleep, given the relative quiet of the building and the lazy day the rest of the party seemed to be having. Wanda could not recall the last time she slept through the morning, nor could she recall the last time she’d been to any sort of party. She could not recall the last time she shared a bed with a man, and as the vibration under Vision’s skin stilled and his temperature warmed, she realized she could not recall the last time she felt a man’s warm body against her own. Occasionally, Wanda glanced up and caught Vision watching her, but by the third time she stole a look at his face, his eyes had shut and sleep had finally taken him. She could sense the faintest stirring in his mind of a dream, but it was fragile and fleeting. As if his mind and body were too exhausted for even that.

Wanda’s eyes fixed on his lips. As red as his skin, and just where she remembered, she saw the smallest little circuitry-like lines. He did not know she was aware of how sensitive those little lines were. He did not know she was aware of the barely-there metal taste on his skin. This was the closest she had ever been to him, and for the first time, she did not feel an ounce of anxiousness or uncertainty. There was only familiarity, safety, something akin to the way she felt as a child, sleeping with her head curled into Pietro’s chest. Safe. Happy.

Staving off the want to steal a kiss, Wanda allowed herself dreamless sleep. They awoke a short while later, more rested, less hung-over. Vision looked and sounded infinitely better. Wanda would have never said it, but upon waking up against his body, she didn’t want to get up or leave that place. Vision hadn’t put his arms around her, he hadn’t tried inching closer to her, he lay stiff beside her, arms folded across his chest. It was a bit amusing. He had something of a curious shyness to him. This would suffice for the time being, Wanda thought.

Their words were soft whispers, like secretive lovers.

The crater in the floor brought amusement to them both. It was the first time she heard him laugh like that. Wanda fought off the sense of nostalgia his laugh filled her with. Under her smile, she felt as though she were trying to stop an avalanche from taking her.

“We should get up, now, Viszh.”

“Yes. We should. Thank you for nursing my pitiful self to health, Miss Maximoff,” He was smiling, his eyes were on her—intricate, blue lenses, a pupil contracting and expanding, taking in her features.

An avalanche was approaching her.

“This bed’s so soft, though. And you’re warm. Kind of like a big space heater.” Wanda’s lips were curled in mild bliss.

“I… would not be wrong to say that you are quite warm as well.” Vision glanced downward when she seemed not to be looking—her shirt was cut low, her breasts pressed together in a way he tried not to so obviously notice. Wanda caught him and chuckled under her breath, to his feigned confusion—“Did I phrase that incorrectly, Miss Maximoff?”—the avalanche was crashing down on her.

A smile looked so wonderful on him. Wanda wanted to kiss the lines on his lips once more. Irises shifting, blue like an electric sky. Human pupils dilate when they gaze upon someone they love.

“No. You phrase it just fine, Viszh.” Wanda sighed, “Just… call me Wanda.”

“Of course, Wanda.”

The avalanche had consumed her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huwaaah, so welcome back about a year later, right? Thank you so much for the kudos and reviews thus far, after about September, I wasn't sure I was going to keep this fic up, but after seeing Civil War, I've fallen right back in love with this pair and need to write some scarlet vision smut (let us be honest rly.) At the moment, these chapters thus far and probably the next one or two will take place before Civil War. But Civil War will definitely be included, so I'll mark those chapters in the beginning for potential CW spoilers (though those chapters probably won't come for a good while.) Happy to be back in this ship, holy jeez, I missed the scarlet queen and her giant mechanical dingus.


	4. marionette

**{ part two: sacricolist }**

 

The party’s return to the Avenger’s facility from the Stark Tower had been a tumultuous ride. Where he and Wanda had managed to sleep away a hangover (and Vision would certainly never forget the life lesson he’d acquired regarding alcohol) the rest of the party seemed to take a bit longer to recover. Perhaps in part due to Wanda’s abstinence from the poison and Vision’s herculean ability to metabolize the alcohol, they were largely unfazed by the afternoon. However, all of Steve, Sam, Rhodes, and Tony appeared a mess. Clint happily took some pills before their flight and slept the whole way back. Miss Romanoff’s status was difficult to discern—when Tony complained, she masked a smug grin. But at a point of turbulence in the flight, Romanoff looked more ill than she let on.

“Remind me again, why, as officers of peace and world safety, we partied like damned college students, Stark?” Sam groaned.

From behind dark shades, Stark’s expression was presumably, only slightly less miserable, “Because _carpe diem_ , my friends.”

Romanoff stole the bottled water that the sleeping Clint had lying on his lap. There was a small amount left and she gave a quiet, “Thanks, Clint,” before downing the rest of the bottle’s contents in one swig.

Wanda had remained quiet through the flight. She always took a seat beside Vision when they traveled, and especially seemed to get tense during trips in the quinjet. Her clear eyes stared straight downward, fixated on the floor, and her lips were parted in soft breaths. Occasionally she would sigh and shut her eyes. Vision had bits and pieces of a dream in his mind, the recollection of which was marred by his intoxicated state during the night. In that dream, he had felt those lips brushing against his own, felt those warm sighs against his tongue. Even in her state of unease, Wanda’s presence beside him was all he could have asked for—at least there, she was close enough to protect. Perhaps even let her sleep against his shoulder, should she manage to nap the flight away… however, the rough ride made that desire a pipe dream, he was certain.

“Isn’t it great that this thing about never hits turbulence or air pockets except for the day we’re all shriveled up from alcohol poisoning, though? Fantastic. Radical, even.” Tony half grumbled when a sudden dip sent everyone’s stomachs lurching.

“Would you rather get out and fly it, Tony?” Steve answered.

“I _might_ prefer it, Steve. _I just might_. What about you, Champ,” Tony’s voice was in Vision’s direction now, “let’s blow this popsicle stand before Red Riding Hood loses her popsicles.” 

It was a beat before Vision responded, having been watching Wanda’s silent distress with concern. When Wanda glared upward at Tony, a less-than-favorable burn in her eyes, Vision realized Tony was making a joking offer that would inevitably be at Wanda’s expense.

“I’m fine.” Wanda answered through grit teeth.

“Glad to hear you’ve been granted this small mercy,” Tony replied, before another dip, “…and with that, we’re living like rock stars, people.”

Wanda shuddered. She hated planes, but bore it. Each flight got easier as Vision watched her gain steady control over her own powers—perhaps knowing she could levitate had worked to ease her aviophobia. Still… it seemed that in times like this, belted into the closed quarters of the quinjet’s cabin, the stressor was less the fear of falling and more the fear of being closed in. He noted that Wanda had displayed claustrophobic tendencies in the past. Her symptoms were consistent.

Sam and Tony were bantering, but their words took little priority in his mind. Tony was talking his way out of a sour mood, at least, stirring up stories with Sam and Rhodes about their suits and flights.

Wanda was again focusing on her shoes, occasionally shutting her eyes and breathing steady, perhaps mentally counting the seconds between each inhale and exhale. Her left hand lay at the edge of her seat, inches from his leg. Slender fingers, pink knuckles, no longer clutching at the seat’s edge until they paled.

 _“Call me Wanda.”_ She had said to him that morning, so small and yet so grand. Under blankets beside him, keeping him safe. Smiling up at him, those clear eyes shining like a summer sky. Now they were closing out the storm around them. He sensed the faintest tremble in her fingers despite her attempts at relaxation.

_Wanda._

Her brows furrowed when a smaller rumble of turbulence shook the cabin. She sucked in another breath. Vision gave in to the want for her hand. Her trembling stilled when his fingertips traced across her own, starting cautiously at her smallest finger, past her ring finger and finally brave enough to let their digits intertwine.

Wanda’s eyes opened partly, and through mascara-darkened lashes, she eyed their joined hands. Her breathing calmed. He saw a smile on her face for the first time since the flight began.

“Red Riding Hood,” Sam had interrupted that held breath between them. Wanda’s hand was gone from him, now folded in her lap. Her smile was gone and her lips straightened, as if rebuilding the wall Vision had momentarily slipped through.

“What?” Wanda’s response was abrupt.

“You ready for more flight training when we get back?” Sam flashed a teasing grin, “I want to see you keeping up with us in the air. With this talk of flying and all.”

Sam, Rhodes, and Tony had initiated an aerial speed war and Wanda had just been invited into their competition. None had noticed Vision and Wanda's momentary touch. With the way Wanda slipped back into conversation, Vision wondered if she had even truly noticed.

She _had smiled_ , though.

In the days that followed, Vision realized that she was smiling more, in fact.

It was difficult to discern whether she was gaining happiness from the sense of inclusion within the team and its recreational ventures into flight… or if he had any effect on her happiness.

Vision found himself questioning this each time he saw her and the way her moods shifted like the lull and pull of the tides under silvery, crescent eyes.

She was both present and absent, suddenly.

Or perhaps this Schrödinger-esque phenomenon that was Wanda Maximoff’s presence was simply his own mind happening upon the realization that something had changed since the trip to Stark Tower.

Paradoxically, their interactions were affected and simultaneously unaffected.

Observation one: the same smile, the same greeting—“Morning, Viszh,”—the same grit and grin during sparring, the same interaction during training, the same penchant for disappearing for the showers and reappearing approximately forty minutes later somewhere between the rec-lounge, the kitchen, or her bedroom, freeing damp hair from a scarlet towel. Unaffected, a pattern unchanged, a smile presented to him when she crossed his path in a corridor, no different from before. A case of absence—absence of the Wanda who had so boldly shared a bed with him on the morning of that hangover, chaste and yet enacting upon him unintentional seduction. A case of presence—the fact that, perhaps, she had always been the same Wanda and yet the only change is a mere placebo in his mind upon the medication that was her name on his lips, changed from formal to casual.

Observation two: a different smile, a different greeting—“Morning, Viszh,”—an air of heat during their sparring, each touch during training like a burn melting him from the inside. A penchant for stealing his gaze and then rushing away when he turned to face her. Disappearing for the showers, and reappearing approximately forty minutes later, somewhere between the rec-lounge, the kitchen, or her bedroom, waiting to cross paths with him before freeing damp tresses with the hint of a nymph’s playful glow on her features. A toss of the hair, bouncing auburn curls, her neck exposed, ivory and smooth before wet tresses tumbled back down to veil it. A case of presence—presence of the Wanda who had sought him out with every intent of usurping the imposter copy of herself within his mind. The change was a clear sign to all who bore witness that she was no longer, to Vision, “Miss Maxmoff,” but rather, “Wanda,” and the placebo was, in fact, a powerful opiate to which even a synthetic man could become addicted.

Both cases existed side by side, and yet Vision could not pinpoint which linearity in which he existed.

In cycles of approximately 120 hours, his body slowed and the effects of fatigue and wear enacted their symptoms on his body’s organic system. Of this time, five days would pass between the moment he first said her name whilst fixated on her eyes, her smile—“Wanda”—and the next taste of sleep. In accordance with his personal experimentation on the nature of his sleeping mind and the projections of “dreams” he took note of each glance, each slight, each trailing echo of her words as well as each gaze that lingered (or perhaps, did not linger—Wanda seemed to impose upon him unintentional temporal distortion) for later reference. Every second of her presence only served to craft greater accuracy in the spectral sister of hers who haunted his dreams.

“Vi-iiszh… I know you’re there…” Wanda was strumming a quiet melody on a guitar in her quarters.

Her door was open, but he stood outside in the hallway, listening, memorizing each note.

Evidence for observation two—acknowledgment of a stronger bond since the moment two states split. Or so he would like to imagine.

“My apologies. I did not want to make you uncomfortable.” Ignoring the door a mere two feet aside, Vision phased through the wall, all too eager to see her sitting on her bed. She held the guitar over crossed legs, wearing those pajamas with the black thin-strapped top and a cartoon mascot of a mouse printed on cotton bottoms. She smiled at him. Eyes like the night sky.

Wanda laughed, “You never make me uncomfortable. Don’t worry.”

“What… what are you playing, might I ask?”

With a shrug, Wanda answered softly, “Nothing in particular. Sometimes I just like to play with the chords.”

Her fingers moved elegantly. Vision neared, finding another case for split-linear observation; case one, the want, the desire, the need to close the distance between she and himself, and case two, the want to remain at a safe distance, the aversion to the risk of shattering the fragile thing that was Wanda’s trust and comfort. He caught himself thinking about it more and more these days, that off-chance that he would say something wrong or move too close and she would regard him with displeasure in her eyes.

“It is a beautiful sound.” He took a seat a short distance beside her at the edge of her bed.

“Thank you,” Wanda laughed, “…you are not tone-deaf, are you?”

Vision was not sure what to make of that question. Had he misheard something?

Wanda looked at him as he opened his mouth to speak but found himself at a lack of words.

“My comprehension of tone is perfect in accordance with my design. I could identify each note as you go, if, perhaps, you are in need of transcription.”

“You,” Wanda stopped playing and rested a gentle hand on Vision’s knee, “…are a dork.”

The database definition of that word would have confused him further had he not spied the slang meaning. A dork; one of awkward social behavior, lacking in style. Glancing sideward, Vision caught sight of his reflection in a wall-mounted mirror and wondered if, perhaps, his clothing was offensive, or was it rather just his behavior?

“This is a positive thing?”

Wanda nodded, playing that tune which his mind had long since taken to recording. Watching her fingers move and her head slowly bob to the melody, his mind recorded the sight of her. A memory to be replayed to the most vivid detail when he would inevitably leave her for the evening.

Happiness. Wanda and happiness. Record. Repeat ad infinitum.

“It is the best thing.”

_The best thing…_

“Viszh… do you dream when you sleep?” Wanda asked this question slowly. He sensed a momentary break in her voice at two points, but could not identify the cause.

“I do.”

“What do you dream about?”

_You._

“Initially I dreamt about dialogue and actions I had taken part in throughout my waking period—a phase of approximately one-hundred and twenty hours, give or take three hours depending on situation or wherever I happen to be when the need for sleep arises. Dr. Cho had suggested I was only capable of playing back memories of events that had transpired. As I acquired more experience with sleep and the nature of dreaming, however, I found the content of my dreams to be more… random. Inexplicable. Faces of people around the base, present in places they should not normally be. Locations that did not make spatial sense. Temporal distortion. I… I find the experience of dreaming to be, perhaps, the most fascinating sensation yet.”

“Do you ever… dream about people close to you?”

Vision felt himself take in a slightly deeper breath. He felt a vague sense of tension. Surely, an honest answer to that question would result in a dam of information breaking and the breaching of a line he was decidedly not ready to cross.

“I… yes.”

Wanda’s grin and narrowed eyes hinted at underlying mischievousness, “Like who? What do they do?”

_Like you, naked and kissing paths across my body that I couldn’t possibly describe to you now._

“I-I dream about sheep. Sheep sometimes.” Well, Vision reasoned with himself, it was not a lie. He _had_ once dreamt of sheep.

“Sheep.”

“Sheep. I… uh, well,” Vision scrambled for any random bit of information that crossed his mind to detract from the flood of vivid memories of Wanda’s seductress doppelganger.

Wanda had stopped playing. Had he upset her?

“I, Tony had once suggested to me that, in order to achieve sleep, that I should try and count sheep. Imagine sheep. And, so, well, I… I imagined sheep. Their wool. The way the fibers collect static electricity should they brush against one another. Consequently, I dreamt of sheep.”

Pursing her lips, Wanda nodded and said, “Cool.”

“Cool…?” Vision repeated the word. It felt faint and undefined and he was not sure he liked it in this context.

“There are sheep in a farm a few miles from the outskirts of the base,” Wanda said, strumming again, “…they are cute.”

“I’ve seen them. I… I would like to pet one.” Vision confessed, once again thinking of static-collecting fibers strung through fabric.

Wanda snorted and then started to laugh.

“What?” Vision asked.

Her laughter was growing despite her efforts to conceal it.

At least she was laughing again.

“You really are something wonderful, Viszh.”

He hadn’t realized until that moment, how much the gap between them had closed during the small motions of their conversation. Glancing downward, at the mere inches between his fingertips and her hip. The scent of citrus in her shampoo mingled with the incense burning across her room. Under dim, gold light, without the thick layer of black mascara darkening her eyes, he noted her lashes were long and slightly gold, and her lips a soft cerise even without makeup.

It never ceased to fascinate him that Wanda appeared more beautiful each time he was near her.

No dream substitute could ever compare to the real Wanda. Yet, with some bitterness, he realized that unless he sought to risk ever being this close to her again, her doppelganger would have to do. That thought made something dark and unsettling well within his chest.

“I should get some sleep. It’s getting late.” Wanda sighed, her voice wistful.

“I will take my leave, then. Thank you for having me.” Vision said.

She turned her head, and all at once, that distance he’d been so fixated with proved to be so much closer than either of them realized. Never before had he kissed her outside of dreams, and yet, there was a distinct sense of familiarity in her lips so close to his own.

“Thank you for not running at the sound of my guitar-playing.”

“I’d like to hear it again.”

Her eyes were mesmerizing, associations in his mind crossed through to _stars_ , _moon_ , and _goddess_. Imagery in his recollection flashed symbolism of a triple goddess associated with the moon to numerous human cultures. Inches from her lips, he could only muse that his constructed carbon copy of Wanda was mere, damnable idolatry—under her touch he would inevitably be chastised in violation of this commandment.

“I’ll play for you again sometime.”

“I would greatly enjoy that…”

“Any time, then.”

_Let time stop now, in this very moment, and I would surely be at the event horizon of paradise as a singularity._

Wanda’s eyes glistened before she blinked and slipped away. With that, paradise was gone and time resumed. He stood and made for the nearest wall in silence. Phasing through it, he carved a path through the facility for his room.

His room was bleak, nearly sterile in comparison to Wanda and her small, but growing collection of personal items, tarot decks, divination devices and musical instruments. He had books. He decided he needed a music player of some sort. Yes. He decided, then, that he enjoyed music.

Any song could echo in his mind through connection to digital networks, provided he had a title, a search string. However, there was a distinct difference between a song in his head and a song played on Wanda’s bed. All he had at that moment was the note-by-note memory of the strings she picked and the unique tuning of her aged guitar. Her third string was off, but not unpleasant.

Her lips were vivid in his mind, just inches shy of his own.

_Idiot. “Dork.”_

_You’ve made her wary._

Vision focused on the melody.

He squeezed his eyes shut. It was about that time—minus twenty-six minutes—that he would cyclically give in to the temptation of sleep, and yet for the first time, his mind ran wild where his body craved the feel of his sheets, his bed. Focus. Focus on the music, on her smile.

Wanda in her pajamas with the little cartoon mouse. Wanda in the lounge, moving chess pieces by herself with her mind and crimson lights. Wanda with afternoon light—16:17, cloudless lighting in mid-August—the catch of gold on her hair and the glint of silver in her eyes as she looked up at him through thick lashes. Wanda smiling, greeting him, saying his name, “Hey, Viszh,” Wanda in a sleepy haze on her way to the showers, “…morning, Viszh,” Wanda lying beside him in that bed within Tony Stark’s tower, staring up at him, “I won’t let you die.”

_I fear you’ve already killed me a million times over._

One-hundred and twenty-four hours had passed by the time Vision, lying in bed with eyes fixed on the ceiling, decided this was like that “sheep-counting” night. Not that it would have done any good to attempt counting. That tune was ringing in his mind. Wanda’s voice, humming, a sound he’d stolen one afternoon three months prior when she was unaware of his presence.

It was the same melody.

_There it is—sleep creeping up on me through a lullaby._

“Took you long enough…” Her humming had turned into her voice.

The empty cold of his room became the warm, incense-laden haze of her room. Reality dissolved and dream consumed, and there, the Queen, his goddess, his obsession, loomed over him with a coy smile. He saw stars glittering in her hair, a veil draping over her shoulders and as she neared, leaving soft lights across his chest, his neck, his face. Vision had craved her touch since the last blessed taste of this dream. He reached up, arms around her and pulled her into a kiss.

She giggled. He pulled her down into the sheets and moved over her, heat catching through his body like a wildfire. A breath escaped him when he felt the gentle prick of her teeth catching his lower lip. It was unusual. Aggressive. Had he imagined this? He could not recall that motion, not in any of his visual “research” of human sex acts. No matter. He enjoyed it and wanted more of it.

“You sound like you’ve been waiting for me.” He kissed at her earlobe, gently mimicking the soft bite she’d given him. Wanda sighed. His hands moved along the hourglass silhouette of her body grip digging into the soft flesh at her hip. Being so close to the real thing just hours before left the memory of her skin’s scent vivid and the sound of her breaths repeating on loop in his mind.

“You have no idea, Viszh.” Wanda pressed up against him, her naked form soft, _warm_. She pushed him onto his back with that playful nature he’d been trapped by all evening. Kisses laced with elation, some kind of ecstasy, it was so much more need than he’d ever imagined from his blushing apparition. Perhaps it was a projection of his own frustration.

_If I could just kiss you like this outside of a dream, if only you could be in my arms like this outside of this dream._

“God… _Viszh_ …” Wanda breathed, her hips grinding against him.

He moaned against her neck, the sensation of heat between her legs teasing him with the promise of pleasure. Grinding along his length, each motion was delightful torment to the synthetic masochist. Vision’s arms tightened around Wanda as she put an end to their game. She gasped his name into his chest, taking him to the hilt in one slow stroke. He held her close, gazing up at the sight of her—she bit her lower lip, eyes shut as she lowered herself on his length with a slow rhythm. Nothing could possibly be so beautiful, he thought, watching her hips roll gently against him.

Perhaps he could have called it “instinctive” — the actions by which he moved against her, in pursuit of that scalding gratification that was taking her slender hips in his hands and pulling her body against his own. No other nerves in his body seemed to delight in the tactile sensations as within their core. Her tongue tangled against his and her legs tightened around his waist when they rocked in time with one another. The deeper he moved, worshipful penetration, lips pressed with adoration against her breast, the more his goddess sighed mesmerizing cries for more.

“Viszh… oh, please, don’t stop…” Wanda’s small nails traced lines down Vision’s back.

“I could not even if I wanted,” Vision murmured— _idolatry, graven image, infinite exaltation to an automaton’s rendition of one, divine, scarlet, monad._

“Viszh!” Her breath hitched, she moved faster, she kissed with wanton desire, the flames burned as though to annihilate them both. Her skin was sheen, her features lit by a silver moon. Sensory cortex ravaged with pleasure signals, hypothalamus imbuing each glistening blood vessel with a dose of oxytocin. Vision guided her back into the sheets in a swift yet gentle motion, enamored with the sight of her flushed body from above.

“Wanda…” Her name crossed his lips, so terribly sacred in that moment, each thrust an act of worship.

_Only an idol._

He glanced sideward, toward the door.

A scarlet figure, a silhouette without feature or detail, a shape similar to his Wanda beneath him, but clearly undefined.

Vision would have stared longer at this apparition had he not felt his marionette’s fingers tracing across his shoulder, his jawline, motions of seduction lulling him back into her analogous spell.

“ _Except that’s where the dream always ends, isn’t it? You don’t know what comes next, do you…?”_

He had most certainly heard Wanda’s voice—and yet he most certainly did not see her lips move in that instant. Just a slight part of kiss-plumped lips, her head turned to the side, eyes shut as she lost herself in an image of sexual climax provided to Vision through research.

All he could do was— _…imagine it?”_

“Wanda...!” Pleasure built, he too, had a body capable of succumbing to the contentment of oxytocin and the warm glow of endorphins. Except, this was where the dream would always—

 _“...Always...”_ A disembodied voice speaking with a smile.

—always—

His eyes opened, his skin was cold. His sheets, undisturbed outside the outline of his form. Goddess, gone.

Sleep had been interrupted and the process aborted prematurely by seventy-four minutes. The next closure of his waking cycle would inevitably come sooner. Not another dream would flicker in his mind for an estimate of one-hundred and twenty-one hours, fourteen minutes, sixteen seconds.

And yet, despite his managed hours of REM sleep, he was just as… fatigued and frustrated as when he had laid to rest.

Between his legs, his length pulsed in time with his heartbeat, erect and his lust unsatisfied. Vision rolled onto his side, trying not to think of it, but there it was again—symptomatic obsession. Fixation on that apparition from the doorway, watching him copulate with his beloved false goddess. A sense of… something he’d never experienced before was washing over him. He could identify frustration, he could identify confusion, but there was more, it was growing—this _emotion_ —and branching out into a network of seemingly unrelated psychological elements.

Identification by association—shame, anger, bitterness, emptiness, loneliness.

Research of human sex practices could only point him in what was arguably a “correct” direction, even when alone. Correctness, however, seemed relative against the varying differences of sexual psychology across varying human cultures. To narrow down the clashing of morality regarding a distinctly _human_ desire to micromanage their own pleasure, Vision had focused on what ideas Wanda would, most potentially, have familiarity with—ergo, ignore the sexual frustration until it faded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first three chapters close up together as purely Wanda's perspective, the entirety of part one, "demiurge" and now with chapter four, part two, "sacricolist" begins. Following Vision's perspective in the next few chapters, the order of logic will begin to collapse under the weight of chaotic emotion. The experience of love, deconstructed through an android's eyes is going to get "weird." 
> 
> Thank you guys for the awesome comments and the kudos! I'm really glad to see readers from when this fic came out (around AoU's release) dropping back in~ you guys are amazing. <3 hEART EYES. <3


	5. aeipathy

“Sounds like you’ve just got a crush on Wanda. I guess it’s a normal, inevitable part of you exploring human nature, that you’d… I guess, become _attracted_ to someone close to you. It’s normal to have dreams like that every now and then. The brain can’t help what it shows you when it’s running free like that.” Tony shrugged, “I’ll do you a favor and keep that just between us, though. Scout’s honor.”

Vision drummed his fingertips against the surface of a window, gazing out at the training hall where Wanda was practicing close-quarters combat techniques with Miss Romanoff. Wanda did her best to keep pace with Romanoff, however… she often became frustrated and resorted to her scarlet magic.

“It’s getting worse.” Vision murmured. Wanda had kicked high for Romanoff only to have her ankle grabbed and weight thrown aside. She landed face-first into the mat beneath them. Romanoff helped Wanda back up to her feet. Wanda’s slight frame had the faint shimmer of sweat and an alluring flush to her features.

“Every little detail acts to… remind me of these erotic dreams. It’s no distraction by any means, but it’s terribly …frustrating. I can still follow many processes of thought and analysis on the side, and yet… it is as though these unintentional allusions to sexual curiosity have no end. No end in sight. I have more important duties to expend this energy on. Surely there is a way to work around this?”

Tony took a long swig from a tall container of electrolyte-rich drink. He stared out the window, standing beside Vision with a towel over his shower-dampened head.

“Welp. I don’t know what to tell you. Can’t turn love off.” Tony rolled his shoulders in a shrug and cast Vision a teasing grin.

Vision turned to him, eyes widening slightly.

Cackling quietly, Tony added, “Hands to yourself or you’ll get pregnant and die. Don’t beat your meat or you’ll go to android hell. Welcome to human sexuality in the western hemisphere.”

“I… what? I don’t believe either of those outcomes are even remote possibilities.”

“I’m _joking_. Sometimes pretty girls will catch a guy’s attention. Talk to her if she’s on your mind that much, no need to play clergy. For all you know, getting to know her might be the cure to the crush. They come, they go, we all go home happy. I just… wow, _gosh_ ,” Tony gave him a quick once-over glance, smirking, “I can’t believe I’m giving you _the talk_ , I mean, wow, son. They really do grow up so fast. Between dreaming of electric sheep and Little Red Riding Hood, you’re like a walking Duran Duran album. Has any of this enlightened you at all, or…?”

“I don’t think any of this conversation has enlightened me further, at all, actually.”

“Heck, son. Heck.” Tony said, before giving Vision a pat on the shoulder, “…you really are growing up so fast. Wow. Word of advice, the less you fret about it, the happier you’ll be.”

“Everything about the advice you just gave me has only encouraged further psychological micromanagement.”

“Have a sleepover, then. Though I gotta warn you… sleeping with coworkers…? Gets a bit complicated sometimes.”

Just the thought of Tony’s implication felt as if something was short-circuiting in Vision’s thoughts, “…and now I am compartmentalizing.”

Lips making a straight line, Tony shook his head, “Can’t say I didn’t _try_ to push you in the right direction.”

Vision turned back to the window, back to Wanda far below, “Given my synthetic nature, I don’t believe I am capable of succumbing to an anxiety attack.”

“And _that’s_ you overthinking it.”

“There is nothing to overthink.”

“When you overthink it, it gets weird.”

“…weird?”

“Well, yeah.”

“How so?”

“Don’t know, man… Just… weird. Humans are weird.” Tony shrugged again and made his way for his office.

Vision hung in silence for a breath, alone, processing Tony’s suggestions, “… _all_ of this is weird.”

Throughout all of this, the foremost thought in his mind was that this was a major part of human nature, the underlying structure of human impulses: to a human, life was a mere seventy years, estimate. Accomplishments on a temporal scale stretching beyond that time would require either one, a way to bypass one’s expiration date, or two, another, younger human to continue one’s work.

Cultures and histories rained through his head, letter by letter, verse by verse.

Perhaps for a moment, he’d drawn a human psychological connection between the idea of culture and religion against the drive for sex and reproduction. A singular goal—worship of a divine entity. Initially, worship begins as a wish for protection, a means of expanding one’s lifespan beyond the threat of natural disaster or natural decomposition and oxidization. Worship the divine one, the Sophia, the Monad, the Demiurge, the Christ—worship and be granted, ultimately, _more time_. More time for what? To create. To create what? Legacy, to drive a knife into the surface of the earth and leave a scar that could outlive oneself. Or perhaps to create something more divine, to create something that could create happiness. An equation leading only to another problem in need of an answer.

Create an answer, they cry, perpetuate the belief in pursuit of this answer, pass it down along the generations.

All of it, however, upon deconstruction is merely human denial of mortality. Perpetuation through the vicarious pursuit of a single goal. Deconstructed further, moving from psychological motivation to physical motivation, there is only the instinctual human desire for lust and the reciprocation of hormones fueled by a drive for sex and reproduction. All means to the same end—perpetuate.

Neither of these things of which are particular issues to himself, as a synthetic man—he faces no approximated expiration date, only system destabilization and stasis until supplemental systems bring stability to major systems. An android’s homeostasis. As a synthetic man, he does not even have the function for sexual reproduction. Perhaps a systematic cloning of major conscious drives into an appropriate vessel. But in that unlikely scenario, a successful transfer of consciousness could only occur with a duplicate body. Currently no scenario calls for that option.

However— _however_.

It seems as though, as much as his design was intended for as little human limitation as possible, there seemed to be certain vestigial functions. Vulnerable eyes for sight when surely, a proper design would have something more practical for protection of such organs. A tongue that cannot taste, but can still feel the burn of coffee and the bite of alcohol, form words that, in more practical design, would not even require a tongue or mouth. Nerve endings that not only alert him on a tactile level to threats, but could stimulate the flesh and blood nervous system within his vibranium shell with oxytocin and endorphins and push it to act, even foolishly, for more small pleasures.

The feel of Wanda Maximoff’s skin against his own, the soft of her breasts against him, the scent of her hair—the fact he could sense smells although he could not taste, an imperfection perhaps? A flaw in a rushed design? The want for sleep, the want for dreams… was that all merely his own pursuit of human emulation as a protocol?

The want for _her_ , was that too, merely emulation?

It had to be.

Wanda and Miss Romanoff had stopped sparring now, and were headed for the locker room, the showers. Wanda had stopped and glanced upward, at the second-level windows high above the mats within the training hall. She had a way of sensing exactly where he was. Approximated reason for this fell somewhere around the telekinetic nature of her abilities and— _the voice of vestigial function_ —fondness?

Fondness.

A desire for proximity.

She stared upward at him. Perhaps she could hear his thoughts. Perhaps she could not bypass the event horizon of the mind stone. Perhaps he found himself _wanting_ her to hear his thoughts.

Perhaps it was all placebo. Vestigial human functions. Anxiety. Paranoia. Functionless lust. Senseless, useless, illogical.

Vision could not understand the purpose of a function within himself that fueled sexual desire when, upon analysis, served no purpose. An android cannot procreate with a human, nor would an android procreate in a means other than the transfer of vessels. Even still, there was no necessity or desire for replication, therefore, no necessity for attraction. Was it a human desire, also, to simply crave sexual gratification for no purpose other than pleasure? Fondness? Proximity? This “sexual urge” was entirely pointless, for naught, a waste of time and processes, a—

_“Stay with me.”_

He had said that to Wanda, in varying instances prior, and the memory of those words flickered through his mind again.

_“Stay with me.”_

She smiled at him from so far away, although he could see it clearly from his vantage point. Her smile was a warm ray of light in the middle of black storm clouds.

His fingertips pressed against the window a bit harder for a moment, before he pulled away and left.

“ _Viszh…_ ”

Lips parted. Breaths that needn’t be inhaled, no function gained, no function lost, no carbon emitted into the atmosphere. Oxygen in, oxygen out. Lungs that only recycle.

_“Viszh…!”_

Lips part, breath breathed, vocal chords drawn up in the guttural moan of “V” and pushed forth, sideward. A tongue behind said lips, rising up behind the incisors, the distance between which could be likened to that of an event horizon and its singularity. All of this to the tune of Wanda Maximoff’s voice, the reproduction of which was perfect in an android’s synthetic mind, an android of impractical design.

He caught himself watching her lips more and more in the days that followed. In the training and sparring between them, the way Steve urged them all to seek control and awareness of their abilities. To know their furthest reaches and their limitations.

Vision watched her lips for this word—his name—when she shone scarlet and made unbalanced, wobbling efforts to levitate, to make herself, “as weightless as you, Viszh.”

Each of her hands in his, Viszh had heard those words and felt a reflexive motion on his features follow—a smile. They were alone in the field outside the facility one evening, on a high, grassy hill overlooking (at a distance) both the facility and that one, very distant, very odd little “front” of a farm that had no actual farmers and occasional facility employees to feed the livestock—the sheep, of which, Vision had counted thirty-one.

Wanda’s features were lit with gold and crimson as red as the coat and corset she’d taken to wearing on their missions. A shadow cast from a tall tree sixteen meters to their left had cast its feathered shadow across her features.

Wanda could not yet fly, but oh, how she had taken leaps and bounds in the time between the first pull of her weight as he had caught her in freefall versus that moment.

“If I let go of you will you float away like a cloud?” She asked, her eyes shining through long lashes.

“I have no intention of floating away from you.” Vision had answered, lost in the soft flesh of her fingertips and palms against his own.

“Good. I’m a little afraid of heights. I’m… I’m very afraid of heights.”

“Just… be weightless. Don’t think about it.” Vision had said, phasing lighter into the air, more weightless than a feather. Gravity’s pull tugged less and less as he rose taller than the witchling whose hands he held.

Wanda laughed, “Viszh, I cannot simply… _not think about it_.”

Her eyes cast downward for a moment, he could see the faintest trace of scarlet shadow painting her eyelids. It only made her irises glow like brighter crescents when she smiled back up at him.

“If you will forgive an abstraction, Wanda, what makes you feel like the world is falling away from you? Pleasantly.”

“I… I am not sure. Sometimes I think about this when I manage a few moments of flight, but… I always think about, I lose my balance. I think about… I just feel the earth pull me back down… I… I think about…”

A brief memory of Sokovia flickered in his mind as he made the connection.

“You fear falling?”

“I fear falling again… falling as I should have. With everyone I should have fallen with.”

“You did not fall. I was there.” Vision said. Wanda turned, following the weightless ghost of an android moving around her. Her feet were still heavily planted in the ground. She had not even jumped high in days—he had sensed anxiety since the flight from Manhattan. That reminder of how high they had once been, before she had the fallback of her powers to soften any collision with the earth—not unlike himself, she was still learning.

“I should have fallen.” Wanda repeated.

“I could argue against that until the end of time. Perhaps I will.”

“You would be outliving the very being you argue the honor of.”

“Perhaps I would. But I would still argue it. Until my dying day.”

“You wouldn’t die, would you?” Wanda said, feigning a soft smile, “I can’t imagine it.”

“I suppose if the functions of my physical vessel were to cease entirely, then yes, I may perish. In the best-case scenario, I imagine backup systems would force my consciousness into a state of standby until an appropriate replacement vessel is located. And if it cannot, then perhaps I may simply remain nonexistent until each electric particle building my _self_ dissolves.”

“Don’t say things like that. I don’t like thinking about you fading away.”

Humans deny mortality until the moment which they are faced with it.

“You’re thinking too much, Wanda.” Vision said, “Unproductive over-analysis overloads the system. Processes could be better put elsewhere. Perhaps … _upward_.”

“I’m afraid to fall.” Wanda’s feet had gained several inches from the ground. The two figures revolved around one another in a slow orbit.

“I won’t let you fall.” Vision reassured her, “…you fear confinement. When you let go of that which binds you to the earth itself, you will overcome the confinement of the world entirely.”

“You make this sound much... _much_ more metaphysical than I think it actually is, Viszh,” Wanda gave a weak, half laugh, rising higher. He was guiding her higher.

“Hold this distance from the ground. Keep it. Where you are on the geometric axis between the surface and ‘upward’ is your own. Of x, y, and z, you are here. It is your very own place. Yours and yours alone.”

Wanda bit her lower lip. She was rising further from the ground, but still, he carried her weight, unwilling to cut her free until he knew for certain she would not fall.

“I thought I was getting better… better about heights. Better about… feeling like if I get too high up, I won’t be able to find somewhere safe. L-like, if I fall, I fall. I fall and I die.”

“You won’t die. I won’t let you die.”

Twenty-four feet and nine inches separated them from the grass below, now.

Wanda’s face was spelling panic as she looked down. She squeezed her eyes shut and turned her head away from the earth below.

“Look at it.”

She shook her head, “If I look down, I’ll faint.”

“We’re only going higher from here.” Vision felt something, some vague amusement in this. She was so safe, so very, safe, and yet she was so afraid. Was this that sense humans got when they jumped out of closets at one another? Amusement in controlled environments. Her hair lifted on a breeze, the shine of setting sun caught in amber and auburn.

Wanda shook her head, “I don’t want to fall, Viszh, just take me back?”

“Trust me. Please.” Vision said.

Wanda’s brows were furrowed in tension. Vision did not find this amusing. Perhaps this was bordering on cruelty and the best course of action would be to return her to the ground. Wanda opened her eyes, took a deep breath and looked down. Fifty-one feet, three inches from the hill from which they departed. Her lips parted in a soundless gasp as she blinked and fought off vertigo. She sucked in another deep breath and forced herself to stare downward. They continued rising upward. Her grip on his hands tightened.

“Gosh, Viszh… you taking me to the moon?” Wanda feigned a joke.

Vision smiled.

Monotonous, he replied, “Yes. I’ll fly you to the moon, to let you play among the stars.”

Wanda nodded and, breathless, added, “And… you’ll let… let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars?”

“In other words, hold my hand,” Vision spoke, watching her and her eyes squeezed shut, her fair and beautiful features so visibly fighting off a storm of fear. He wanted so desperately in that moment to brush the hair from her face, behind her ear, to stroke her cheek.

“In other words,” Wanda breathed, finally meeting his eyes.

In that moment, all he felt was… _undefined._

“…darling, kiss me.” Vision finished the lyric.

Ninety-seven feet, eleven inches from their starting point. That was where she held his hands tight and leaned up—he felt her weight against his forearms as she moved—and, indeed, she kissed him.

When their lips parted, neither had realized that he had let go of her palms. That his fingers were tracing across her jawline, the curve of her ear, the silk of each tress of golden brown hair. She fixed her eyes on his, her breathing rate elevated, her heartbeat, elevated, the entirety of both of their beings, elevated. Elated, subtly, juxtaposed by the silence that followed.

“I’m sorry.” Wanda breathed, “I-I shouldn’t have…”

“Do not apologize,” Vision said, “…the feeling is reciprocated.”

Wanda glanced downward. She winced. Then she shut her eyes and pressed her forehead against his shoulder, “Everything is spinning.”

Despite visual cue, Vision could imagine exactly what she must feel at that moment. He had assumed the sensation flooding his brain was mere vertigo. But perhaps it was a shared neural response to sharing of impulses.

“We are revolving at a slight degree, perhaps you feel th—”

“I… I know what I feel.” Wanda answered. This was cryptic. This was an open-ended statement that pertained to numerous possibilities that were beginning to flood and overload his system of priorities.

“…odd,” Vision stated, his tone sterile, “…this… this sensation is similar to the effect of the alcohol from Stark’s party.”

He heard Wanda quietly laugh against his chest. Just that fluttering sensation alone could have drawn a sigh from him. Certainly, now, the universe around them spun.

“I’m afraid to fall, Viszh. I can’t… I can’t lose someone I love like I lost Pietro,” Wanda confessed, “…I can’t… I can’t ever love someone like I loved Pietro.”

Vision stared upward at a single cloud, south by east, in the shape of a growing cumulous, “I have no siblings, nor have I family. I cannot imagine what the sense of love for one’s family must be like. Nor the sense of losing one’s family. But I can surmise that losing… losing you would be akin to losing the entirety of what I’ve gained and experienced thus far.”

“Just stop.”

A sting. “Of course.”

He could see the faint hint of stars in the looming night sky. They blinked, not unlike the blinking of the glittering cityscape he had first seen in Stark’s tower, the day he was born.

“I’m sorry I said that. I didn’t mean that. I’m just… I’m afraid of this. It’s not fair to lash out at you, you’re the only one I know who cares about me without some guilt or ulterior motive.” Wanda said. He felt her arms moving, they were around his waist. Reflexively, his own arms moved to wrap around her small shoulders, one hand rising to stroke the long curls at the back of her head. She was bliss, personified.

“Pietro… loving Pietro was not like loving any man. Pietro was not merely my brother. We came into this world together and we should have left it together. Loving Pietro was not… was not like loving any boys in Sokovia through touch and sex. Entirely the opposite of that. Pietro was comfort, safety… home. A smile from Pietro, a kiss on the forehead when I had a fever, it meant so much more than any good-looking boy in Sokovia touching my body or kissing my lips. I would have been happy enough with just Pietro, even when he had girlfriends and secret lovers he hid from those girlfriends. It didn’t matter as long as he was simply _there, always_. As long as… if I fell, he could be there… and when he fell, I was always there for him, always… except… except… when I wasn’t. I couldn’t catch him. I couldn’t save him.” Wanda’s tears were hot against his chest, even through the clothing he manifested—he felt the burn, the sting of her suffering.

“Is that contentment to you, Wanda? Merely standing in the shadows, watching the one you love from a safe distance?” That apparition from the doorway flickered in Vision’s memory.

“I am used to it. I’ve always watched the one I love loving someone else.” Wanda answered, “Maybe I prefer it.”

“You prefer to just watch.” Vision said, something bending inside of him, groaning and on the verge of tearing in half.

“I do prefer it,” Wanda said, her eyes dark as she faced him, “I can’t be hurt by love a stupid game when I’m not a participant. I would rather never win than lose someone I love again. The outside is where I belong. Watching men and their dolls.”

Closer. Closer, and closer to breaking, Vision breathed, “Dolls.”

“I couldn’t save Pietro and I can’t even save myself, much less fly. Keep the doll, Viszh. I’m better in your dreams than I am in reality.”

Broken, like an iron beam torn in half.

 “I would be doing you an injustice by stepping into a hole in your heart that is shaped like Pietro.” Vision felt the words leave his lips—words that felt in line with _something_ in his chest, but cut like daggers through his mind. Through instinctual _ulterior motive_ —those were words by which he would let her go.

But she would fly on her own, perhaps, then. An end to justify the means.

Her hold on him tightened. He shut his eyes and began to fade.

“Your brother is no longer in this world, on a corporeal level in which we can quantify, Miss Maximoff,” Vision said. Her arms tightened until she slipped through him and she began to panic, stumbling, pawing desperate for something to hold on to, some way not to _fall_.

“Viszh!”

“I will not go on. This is knowledge of which you are keenly aware. If you seek to preserve a semblance of his life, his existence, then the only further action, sensibly, would be to move forward, carry on and become, truly, yourself rather than grieve safe ghosts for an eternity.” Vision phased through her, behind her, and she was truly, then, shining a bright scarlet of terror as she raced for him, for grip.

“Viszh, I-I’m going to fall!”

“You won’t fall.”

“I can’t do this—”

“You can _and you will_ , and if you fall you know that I will catch you.” Something burned in Vision’s voice as he spoke those words.

Wanda’s eyes were wide, filled with tears and anguish and fear.

“Compared to you the world is harmless. Under your fear, you are aware of this potential.” Vision said, shifting around her slowly, “Fall. Do it. You know you will not die. Not beside me. Not in your own hands.” — all humans fear death.

“Viszh!” Wanda had lost three feet, five inches.

“Do not fear what cannot hurt you.”

“…hypocrite!” Wanda lost it. She was in freefall. Vision’s arm lunged out, and he gripped her hand.

This was his first taste of frustration and anger as a cocktail, “How so, Wanda? How am I a hypocrite?”

“You’re afraid of more than you let on. You… you are human, too.”

“I… I am only an emulation.”

“And what is that? A copy? You feared what you didn’t expect just by getting drunk—” Wanda’s words came through grit teeth, “You lost control and you felt _fear_. Don’t… _don’t_ tell me to face my fears when you can’t even face your own!”

“What is it I fear, then, Wanda?”

Wanda’s other hand had taken to gripping his right forearm as he held her from falling. The earth’s pull on her intensified the more her fury’s flames burned. Tears were in her eyes. At that sight, Vision could swear he felt heavier.

“You fear losing this perfect state of peace you have, you fear losing control, you fear losing yourself for mere seconds because you think it’s death, just like any child getting their finger pricked would!” Wanda’s hold was slipping as his corporeal form dematerialized slowly, softening, becoming harder to grasp. Wanda pawed at his arm though her fingers were slipping through his silhouette.

“What is it, you believe, that I fear losing control over? I have the sense you are referring to something specific of which I am unaware. Perhaps a misunderstanding.”

“Misunderstanding…” Wanda said through grit teeth as she glimpsed downward, “…you can’t preach to me that I should let go of my safe ghosts when you can’t even let go of a dreamt doll.” 

Safe. Safe to be alone with a ghost in a waking life of mourning. Safe to be alone with a doll in a dream of what could have been. Doll. Marionette. The scarlet apparition in the doorway.

Anger stung. Penetrated. A nail pushed deep through his core until it tore through the other side.

“This is cruel, Viszh, I hate this!” A terrified, anguished sound escaped her, “Vision! Just, just put me down!”

Vision let the frustration at his lack of answers dissolve, “I am not the only one accused of cruelty. Here _we_ are. Answers may not make us die, but perhaps they will expedite the process… and we are afraid of it. Look at us.”

 “To learn to trust is only a small death,” Wanda said, “…that is what my brother used to say.”

“And now it is what you say.”

Wanda nodded.

She released his arm. She fell, seventeen feet, and then she slowed to a weightless stop. Vision could see tears escaping her eyes—they floated, too.

She floated alone for two-hundred and ninety-seven seconds before he rejoined her. The sun was gone, now. Only stars surrounded them.

“In that regard… if you’ll forgive the abstraction, then if we die, we die together, then.” Vision said only this to her, before slipping back down toward the earth. Wanda watched him, and he kept his eyes fixed on her, never straying too far. She rose higher. For a moment, he thought she would disappear through the clouds. But he sensed where she was, always. When she was once more, clearly in his sights, she descended but only of her own desire.

Away from him.

Nevertheless, he never strayed too far.

He did not see her for the rest of the night. She took her own route back to the facility, back to her room. He took his own route, but still, through the walls, he felt her at a distance. A series of dull, red lights in the shape of one Wanda Maximoff, burned out from the pressure he’d applied to her, in effort to induce crystallization.

His room was far lonelier that evening. Between their return to the facility and that day—approximately three days—he had procured a source for music. Somewhere between conversation about the pleasantry of it with Tony, Tony had dipped into his office and then returned with a device—some record player—“Now believe you me, my friend, _vinyls are the shit_ ,”—with, of course, modern functions. Tony had included a small “starter kit” of records from varying genres. Chet Baker, Miles Davis, even greatly differentiating artists from Elton John to some “ _Nirvana_ ” to a certain “Iron Maiden” and a “Metallica” and an odd group referring to themselves as someone’s “ _Bloody Valentine_ ” — Tony’s musical tastes were notably varied. Vision preferred the music of gentler tempo and tune.

Distraction through music. Perhaps this was what Tony had referred to when he had made another of his running jokes about some kind of “teenage phase” that Vision did not quite make heads or tails of. Was exploring music a trait more common to human teenagers than adults?

Vision gazed through the window at the stars—research had proven the statement in itself, as a statement, to be trite on a literary level, and perhaps, even, on a socio-psychological level. Stars were the only thing that reminded him this messy tangle of human entrapments were not the one core singularity of the universe. Stars were the thing that reminded him of Wanda Maximoff’s eyes when she smiled or the skyline of Manhattan from the highest floors of Stark’s personal Tower of Babel. At least the glistening lights of Wanda’s eyes could be replicated in the duplicate residing within Vision’s mind and dreams.

_“You could have killed me.”_ Her voice rippled in his mind.

Vision paused, glancing upward from the box of records Tony had gifted him. That voice was coming from inside of his mind.

“Are you angry with me?” Vision asked. His gaze was blank. Was he reaching that point of “humanity” — re; human stress as a distinctly _human_ experience — that he was, as they say, speaking to himself? Or was he hopeful and correct in assuming Wanda’s telekinesis had the mercy of reaching out to him? He could not speak to her, but oh, he was starting to suspect that _she_ could _speak to him_. But only when _she_ pleased.

Silence followed for a moment, before the voice repeated, _“You could have killed me. You toaster.”_

Vision shut his eyes.

Vision turned his head in the direction of Wanda’s room. Perhaps she _was_ reaching out for him after an evening of blatant avoidance. The current time read 01:14 in the morning. He did not need sleep yet. Not for another 27 hours, approximately.

And yet, nowhere near the closure of his current waking cycle, he felt the siren call of his dream’s spectre—that _dreamt doll_ —reaching out for him. _She_ was there, in his mind, tracing her fingertips along his torso, trailing downward toward his length and he felt, with so much certainty that _she_ was there, ghosting her lips over his own, over his chin and over the gem on his forehead with some kind of mercy.

“Just a doll.” He murmured, pushing the thought aside. There was a pang of bitterness to that voiced thought.

How often had that doll in his dreams been Wanda? Or _his_ Wanda?

Vision thought back to the red figure in his doorway, the last time he slept, that apparition watching him distractedly make love to her carbon copy. Vision grit his teeth. Surely this was all in his mind. But nothing of this made any sense to him. Placebo, placebo, placebo. Reasonable doubt. Imagination as a human _flaw_.

Fascination. Fixation. Obsession.

_“I’m getting jealous of your doll, Viszh.”_

Wanda certainly, must have been there. Watching him.

She watched him flee his own dream at the moment of climax out of fear.

Pathetic. Afraid to be human, to give in to human pleasures. Fear was easy to give in to, he noted—fear of rejection, fear of shame. How apt it was that he felt little fear for the threat of physical damage, but the fear of psychological damage seemed a singularity that threatened to pull him into a bleak eternity.

_“Shame is relative. I heard you say it once. Think it, at least.”_

“What are you encouraging me to do, then?” Vision murmured.

_“Let yourself fall.”_

“I am starting to think you may be the braver one of the two of us.” Vision answered.

Vision shoved away these thoughts, closed off this bridge between wherever this voice came from—be it his imagination or Wanda herself—and sought to lock himself away until the night and its loneliness had passed and the others were awake for the day, apt to busy his priorities from _her._

The source of her enticing words could have been either, one, a telekinetic Wanda herself, beckoning him her way, or two, his own delusion, his own placebo, his marionette taking sentience within his mind in effort to corrupt his actions. Logic over reason, Vision reminded himself.

The lust at the thought of Wanda biting her plump, lower lip as she eyed him coyly was a mere fabrication. At least, Vision tried to convince himself as much. Imagination was painting a picture of her, in her bed, slender form sprawled lazily amongst her sheets in an incense-scented veil of night. Alone, dreaming of him, of their kiss, hours prior—wishful thinking, perhaps.

That kiss.

It had happened. _Not a dream._

She had smiled for the briefest moment when their lips parted. Although he could not taste the cerise color of her flesh, he certainly could feel it. He could feel the slightest tease of her tongue crossing over his lower lip.

She was very likely lying in her bed at that moment, those same lips parted in shallow, sleeping breaths.

Or perhaps she was not. Perhaps she was still awake, stacking cards with her scarlet magic as if it were some form of meditation.

He could ask her then, for forgiveness.

Vision left his scant room, filled only with soft music. He phased through the wall, phased through the corridors, and floated through the darkness like a ghost. It was only when he reached the final barrier between Wanda’s room and the corridor outside of it that he hesitated. If she were asleep and did not notice him—the _correct_ action would surely be to leave. But he knew, before even entering her room, that it would be difficult to do so.

That he would be liable to make the mistake of _watching_ her. Then he would destroy any trust he had in himself as a being deserving of her attention. It could be, all of this could very well be a mistake.

_“To err is human, isn’t that what they say?”_

Vision phased through her wall, hoping he would appear on the other side, at least, out of her line of sight.

As expected, Wanda was asleep in her bed. He phased in next to the edge of her bed, just to the right of her pillow, where her features held static like the porcelain of a doll. Heartrate low, brainwaves indicative of REM sleep. She was dreaming, and deep in it, and moreover, she was positively cherubic.

That scarlet figure in the doorway haunted his mind, his memory. Was she waiting for him there? Waiting to watch him from the shadows, perhaps. Bitterness stung at the back of Vision’s mind for a brief moment.

Vision faded away and back again, this time over her. Weightless, but with only a distance of a few mere, miserable inches between his lips and hers, beneath him. Completely, physically translucent, as not to alert her to his presence.

He could watch her sleep every night, he mused. Just like this, completely unphased, with no fear of her rolling over in her sleep and bumping into his large, clumsy form beside her, stroking her hair, her cheek, her lips… Vision paused, feeling that familiar sting of shame in the back of his mind.

Perhaps the marionette copy was all he deserved.

Still.

He could happily wait there beside her every night, hoping that one evening, in her sleep, she may sigh his name on her own. Just the thought of it sent a hot chill through his body, stirring again, the solid throb between his legs.

Wanda startled him, shifting a bit wildly at first and then moving to her left. She inhaled deep and quick, twitching her nose a little and then settling comfortably again on her back. More was revealed, then, as her blankets had been tousled aside in her motion. Vision could not have taken in the sight with any more wonder if it had been possible. This was not a dream, by any means.

He could not feel it the way his human companions did. But the weather was warm that day. The last hurrah of summer, Clint had said.

Wanda had peeled off that tan, cotton top he was so familiar with at this point. It was off and it was gone, strewn somewhere on her floor. Unrestrained by the constraints of fabric, her breasts and slender torso were exposed. Dipping further, solidifying his fingertips just enough to peel the blanket downward, he answered his questionable (arguably pointless, and yet somehow mesmerizing) curiosity of her undergarments. Her panties were cotton, black, cut in the design of “boy shorts” and white at the hems. Form-fitting, crossing the curve of her hips and her pelvis. Under a delightfully Venusian mound his fingers traced across the shape her panties hugged, lips, flesh, a node of female nerves designed solely for pleasure. He had always lamented his lack of a sense of taste, but truly, in that moment, did he have a genuine, unanswerable curiosity of what her skin tasted like.

Vision watched the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed slow and deep in the midst of a dream.

His fingers trailed upward from between her legs, tracing the curve of her belly and circling the dip of her navel. Creamy-fair skin, soft with the slightest hint of muscle growing below. Wanda was no athlete, no walking weapon like Miss Romanoff. She was soft at the edges, something Romanoff had pointed out playfully, much to Wanda’s chagrin. She was toned, however, and as the weeks went by, becoming less timid and slight.

_Should you awaken at this moment, I would enthusiastically accept my execution at your hands, Wanda Maximoff._

Still translucent and scarcely fading through the surface of Wanda’s flesh, Vision loomed downward to plant kisses against her breast that she would not feel. His hands ghosted over the curve of her breasts, unable to caress as he would please. He heard and felt Wanda’s heartbeat against his temple as he kissed downward. It hitched up a beat when his other hand slid up across her thigh and for the teasing little white hem of her panties.

_Do not forgive me._

Lower he kissed, toying with the edge of what he imagined was self-loathing. Curiosity, he justified himself with, was driving this.

_Just wake up and destroy me here._

“Viszh…” Wanda sighed in her sleep, startling him nearly into phasing through the floor in escape and terror. She was still, however, very much asleep, to his relief. Wanda inhaled long and slow as he continued to kiss downward across her panties, across the outline of plush lips beneath the cotton. He could feel heat under his lips and could smell an intoxicating, light and mesmerizing scent that only left him craving more.

“Stop…”

Vision froze, his body beginning to fade in anxious humiliation. Fade. Fade out of existence entirely.

“…stop… stop being so melodramatic… hand me the creamer? The ribbons are red.”

Vision remained still, glancing around her room. There was no coffee creamer in her room, and he could not imagine why that was her priority at a time like this.

Her tongue passed through some unintelligible words for a moment before, in a full code-shift to Sokovian, Wanda murmured, “This… this coffee is so hot…”

At this point, Vision realized this must have been that human phenomena of sleep-talking.

He was not sure if he should continue his effort to fade out of existence by means of humiliation and self-loathing or just continue kissing her mound over her undergarment. After a moment’s debate, he opted for the latter, letting his lips phase through the fabric. It garnered a quiet moan from his slumbering test subject. Which, in turn, sent a shockwave of pleasure through him straight down to the tip of his member.

“ _Not_ … _not, not,_ not on the _ribbons_ …!” Wanda sighed again, her words a mix of Sokovian and English.

Vision let his tongue slip through the fabric, across soft lips and folds with a texture like hot, wet silk. The sensation on his tongue was unlike any other he’d ever felt. Nothing he could have ever imagined, although, he had to confess he had not exposed his tongue to a large many textures in his time, yet. Wanda’s legs moved, her hips moved, and again, he froze as if caught, before realizing her body was only reflexively grinding against his mouth and legs parting slightly. It took all his effort not to caress and _squeeze_ her thighs in more solid palms and give himself away as he licked.

The rise and fall of her chest was sending more curious urges between his own legs. With little more thought over it, Vision stroked his length, from base to tip, just as Wanda had in his dreams. It was almost enough to send a shudder through his body. At one time, waking up with hardness like this, he had shuddered when the silk of sheets pulled across his tip, sensitive and untouched. It felt pleasant enough in his palm and even better when he found a steady rhythm not unlike the Wanda who had caressed him in his dreams.

A bitter curiosity lingered in his mind—had it been _his_ Wanda that kissed him, stroked his body and drove him to the brink of bliss? Or had it just been _a_ Wanda, constructed of memories?

His tongue depressed into her, garnering a sharp inhale. Her legs moved slowly, bending at the knee as her back arched and her fingers dug into sheets. Wanda’s breaths hastened and he let his tongue delve deeper before turning attention against the bundle of nerves that made her tremble. At some point, he had lost a bit of concentration on his solidity—when her hand, pawing sleepily, and yet frantically for grasp, landed hard and gripped tight on his wrist.

Vision’s other hand, still stroking his length with growing intensity, gave his own body a taste of the pleasure he gave Wanda.

“ _Don’t stop…_ ” She breathed, words clearly Sokovian, _“Please, don’t stop,”_

Heat in his core and thunderous waves of pleasure rolled through his body from the hardness within his hand. Vision felt a familiar, aching pull toward euphoria as his body succumbed to the bliss of accumulating endorphins. Stroking harder, pumping his fist faster around his length, Vision moaned quietly against Wanda’s wet sex.

_“So close…”_

Too close, logic gone, allured fully by the siren song of curiosity and lust.

Wanda’s back arched as she gripped his wrist tight and cried out. Wetness spilling against his tongue spiked pleasurable interest in him. She shuddered, riding waves of blissful release and trembling as his tongue continued to lap up her juices worshipfully.

He could scarcely tell if she was still asleep or not. Her body was hot and yet chilled with a sheen of sweat. Wanda’s chest rose and fell with deep breaths. He kissed upward across her lower belly, drunk on her pleasure. His tongue traced over the curve of her breast, marking one nipple with deep, sucking kisses.

_“Give in.”_

Exhales escaped him at a dizzying rate. He kissed up along her neck, each stroke pushing him closer to an unknown brink.

That was when he felt naked arms rise up, wrapping around his shoulders.

“I was having… such a good dream… You woke me up, you toaster.” Wanda sighed.

“I… Forgive me…” Vision half-moaned through ravaged breaths.

Wanda bit her lower lip, her sleepy features hiding the trace of a malevolent smile as she stroked the back of his neck with one fingertip.

“Forgive you. For _violating_ me?” He could not tell if her tone was amused, angered, or some cocktail of reactions he’d not yet seen on a human face.

Vision’s forehead pressed against Wanda’s pillow. He resisted the urge to kiss her neck, “Are we to have the hypocrite conversation again?”

He felt Wanda shake her head, her fingertips tracing down along his shoulders, “Two wrongs don’t make a right, Viszh… but I’ll call us even.”

“To err is human.” Vision moaned through grit teeth.

He felt Wanda turn her head and felt her lips soft against his temple, “So you listened to me.”

Vision stroked her face with one hand and her lips wrapped around his fingertip. She sucked, gently, and he watched an amused grin curling at the corner of her lips. Another threatening wave of ecstasy rolled through Vision as he answered, “I did… and I… I’m giving in. As you suggested.”

Wanda’s tongue slipped out, stroking long and slow against the underside of his middle finger, gazing up at him with half-lidded eyes. Letting his finger slip free of her mouth and trail down along her chin, her neck, her collar, Wanda leaned up and brushed her lips against Vision’s. It was every bit akin to the last time their lips touched—in those moments, Vision lamented his inability to taste.

For the second time, he _felt_ with the sort of intensity that drew his every sense away from the world around him. Lips softer than silk, warm, wet when her tongue crossed his lips and grazed against his own. The gentle flick of which sent a trembling jolt of need through his body, shaking him to the core. Wanda had a way of waking something inside of him. Subtly, at first, awakening _thought_ , and overtly now, she awakened absolute desire with each tracing of her fingertips along his back and each sigh of precious breath against his mouth.

“I guess I am, too.” Wanda confessed.

Perhaps that was what it truly felt like to be most alive, most _human_. Indifferent to the universe itself, pulling the most precious being into one’s arms, one’s kiss. This goddess of night, of dreams and the entirety of his soul—and oh, at this point, he was very certain it existed within him, for she herself, in her Monad divinity had crafted him one—would be forever burned into his memory at that moment. Her golden-brown hair like an autumnal halo around her face. She gazed up at him through those crescent moon eyes, setting him aflame as their bodies joined. In that moment she was pleasure personified, lust manifest in flesh and scarlet, if only to him and his own isolated, artificial universe.

When her lips pulled away, kiss-swollen and parted, a quiet moan carrying his name stung hot against his neck and shoulder. She held him desperately, rocking her body against his, her legs wrapped tight around his waist. He gave and moved she pushed him onto his back, her body hypnotic as her hips ground against his. Sensations he could have never imagined burned away the dull ache of longing he’d settled for since this mess of want first began. Her fingertips trailed down across his chest, his abdomen, running along sensitive lines carved into carmine flesh. That in itself had only confirmed what he already knew—that it _was_ her who had experimentally traced her tongue along each sensitive path on his body.

Rhythmic, pleasured cries were muffled through tightly sealed lips as Wanda’s body rocked faster. Vision hadn’t even realized when he’d gripped the blankets beneath them or tightened his grasp around the curve of Wanda’s hips.

“Oh god… Viszh… if you’re dreaming, don’t… _don’t_ wake up… stay with me…”

She drew him closer and closer to the edge, and in return, he slipped his arms around her and pulled her slender body closer.

Her hair was a silken veil around them as he stole one more kiss, trying desperately to stifle the involuntary moans and gasps trying to cross his own lips, “I’ll stay with you always, Wanda.”

Her forehead pressed against his own, her pitch heightened and quickened sighs came, “Oh my god, Viszh…!”

That was the last he saw before release stole over him—euphoria, a loss of time, a crash of some kind of vertigo. Blissful heat spilling between them, their bodies a tangled mess of lust and gasps. Their whispered cries were silenced by a kiss, deeper than any before. Fingertips dug deep into skin, soft bruises that would remain for days, and then a momentary break in consciousness followed. Something dreamlike, for a mere few seconds. Had he been careless, he could have phased straight through the floor in a ghost’s freefall. Like gravity itself ravaged him to the core. He lost himself, eyes shut, seeing stars behind his lids.

When it began to fade, they held each other as if for dear life. His breaths were heavy and her name repeated on his lips like a mantra.

It was then that he opened his eyes again, finally. Still alive, although that could have certainly been very much why the word for “orgasm” in French translated to “small death” — this was what humans did, perpetually. They died only to be reborn.  

Wanda sat up, planting a kiss against his lips.

“Viszh…” She sighed into his steady, deep breaths.

“That was… that was, very, intensely… definitely odd…” Vision breathed.

Wanda giggled and shook her head, “I… didn’t think you could do that.”

“Neither did I.” A small laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gosh, I'm so incredibly grateful for all the love this fic's been getting! Thank you for following and commenting you guys, as always, you guys are awesome for putting up with my stringing these two around the last five chapters. This is going to be the last chapter before things start crossing into Civil War's events. Given Wanda's state by the end of that, the dreams might not be so beautiful in the coming future. As they say, enjoy the dream while it lasts...


	6. nepheliad

While Vision considered himself one who loved unique tactile sensations, there was always something about showers that he could not make heads or tails of. A categorical uncertainty, whether or not he enjoyed the beating of a hot shower against his skin (decidedly enjoyable), contrasted by the sticky humidity of steam in the air (decidedly less enjoyable.) It was enough to soothe him in the one moment in his short life he could ever describe as sickness (that hangover) and it was enough to bear the strangling heat of with Wanda pressed against his naked body.

They had slipped into the shower together, Wanda tip-toeing through the dark corridors with her hand in Vision’s. Her fingertips were small, slender, clasped within his own. She had glimpsed back at him over her shoulder, a mischievous grin on her features.

She took a certain thrill in the secrecy of this particular night. They had a mere three hours left before sunrise. Neither of them would sleep within that frame of time. There were few regrets to be had.

When the water poured across her slender body, fair and nude against the shower’s dark tile, he swore he could have certainly fallen in love with her all over again in the span of 12.72 seconds. That was how long it was before she realized he was staring and then tilted her head slightly to the left, exposing the vulnerable moon-kissed flesh above her carotid artery.

One eyebrow quirked, she asked him, “Just _what_ do you think you’re staring at, Mister?”

When she approached him, she let her arms slip lazily around his waist. Her fingertips traced down across his lower back and then up again, along the dip of his spine.

“You dizzy me.” Vision murmured, shutting his eyes and leaning softly into the sensation of her naked body against his.

Wanda’s smile was hypnotic, something from the moon, indefinitely. Her fingertips came back around again, past his sides, then moving up across the chrome plating of vibranium that had not been covered with crimson flesh. While he could not feel her fingertips or the gentle press of her nails along these chrome parts, there was a sensation at the sound of these tips dragging across metal that sent a shiver down his spine—some decidedly audial pleasure. It was new. Enjoyable.

She was so small in his arms, but still, so powerful, so wonderful. Just the sight of her clear eyes gazing up at him made Vision feel weightless despite his mass.

“Is this… the sensation of falling in love?” Vision breathed.

Wanda’s eyes shifted sideward for a moment. Her expression was not difficult to read—simply one he registered and refused to acknowledge.

She leaned up on her toes, arms now around his shoulders and pulled him into a kiss. Wanda’s soft body was pressed against his, he could feel every curve. The want to taste her again was washing over him. Like a deep, red, wine, she washed away the anxiety in the bottom of his mind. She intoxicated him with the brush of her lips—still heavy with blood flow and slightly bruised by the lack of a mastered touch of gentleness in Vision—gentler, gentler, he reminded himself.

Braver now, than before, he let his hands explore her—the pads of his fingers soaking up the touch of her wet body with fervor. Her back was against the dark, marble tiles. Fair skin shone against it like a moon illuminated by the black of the night sky. Each droplet of water coursing over her body’s curves were the stars. She sighed against his chest when his fingers moved between her legs, stroking her softest, silken flesh.

“Viszh…” Wanda murmured, “We’re here to clean up, Viszh… not to get dirtier.”

“I am starting to think that this is a difficult task when left naked in a shower with you.”

Wanda’s back arched in a serpentine curve, breasts rising, nipples erect. His fingers dipped deeper into her, feeling and massaging her most sensitive core. That seemed to be the nature of sex, he realized—slow, hypnotic rhythm, a pulse in time with the beating of a lust-filled heart. Synthetic, or not, his own heart pounded in time with her own—stirred, once emptied, now, filled with need. He gathered her slender body, holding her firm by the thighs and pinned as gently as he could manage against the wall.

She whispered his name when he succumbed once more to the pull of lust, heralded by her tongue. Her calves were tight against his back and waist as she rocked her hips against his, taking him with more heated, wanton desire than before. Steam filling the air, she was like a dream’s image through a feverish haze. Her arms wrapped around his shoulders, her hold tight as she kissed him.

“Viszh… you’re going to drive us both mad this way.” Wanda sighed, a look on her face, in her eyes as she looked up at him that Vision could only describe as truthfully “cute” — although he wouldn’t dare say it to her face. Wanda hated “cute.” No matter how adequate the term was in describing her at select moments.

“I would have us no other way.” Vision felt a grin rising on his lips.

Wanda had taken on another kind of beauty to him after that night—annihilating all thought that, perhaps, there were minimal _kinds_ of beauty, all of which she had captured before his existence even began.

Even her boredom when she sat at the bar in the kitchen some lazy afternoons, her chin in one hand as she stared out toward a distant window in late-day lightning (gold, scarlet,) she had become a goddess not only of his dream world but his waking world.

His quiet, daydreaming deity, forever watching the rest of the world from just a few clouds higher than the rest.

Certainly, something within himself had changed—the act of mirroring his beloved.

Timelines, parallel, had rectified and unified, solidifying as a linearity, all pulled irreparably into one, Wanda Maximoff, the scarlet singularity. _His_ scarlet singularity. And yet, still, at the center of the universe, she watched the world with continued disinterest. Displacement.

Even with her arms around his shoulders, gasping his name with increasingly frantic need, every dream seemed to come to an end the minute the morning came. She would somehow slip away from him. Index finger against her lips, a “shush” motion. Through long lashes, she gazed up at him and requested earnestly, “…this is our secret.”

Her lips, kissed heavily, ferociously each night, would always curl into the most innocent of smiles as she spoke those words.

Vision could not understand why he felt a pricking sensation within his core at that request. The tiniest incision by an unseen hand. Each rise and fall of her lips, forming these words, were an obsidian scalpel slicing from the apex to the base of one synthetic heart.

A secret.

Yes.

Do not question her request.

Perhaps Wanda knew the subtle, harsh intricacies of human nature better than he did—and surely, they were crossing a line, somewhere in this union.

“As you wish.” He feigned a smile.

It was his first lie without words, but he would not know this until it was in hindsight.

_Wanda, I’ve only just reached you._

Days came and went from that first night.

The surreal shift in the gravity of the universe did not go unfelt by Vision. Suddenly the sun was red. No one else noticed this. Their training came and went, and, as training was determined by Miss Romanoff to be _complete_ , missions that followed continued as if undisturbed by the deconstruction and reconstruction of his perceived universe. The dismantling of one crimson and chrome solipsism.

He kept close to Wanda, always. No one questioned it.

Tony knew, but said nothing.

 _“Scout’s honor.”_ He had once said.

Clint eventually slipped from their ranks, opting for retirement just shortly before another mission drew them back to eastern Europe to investigate terrorism associated by some thread to the HYDRA organization. That mission came and it went.

Wanda’s flight was still growing, but her power to destroy was a sight to behold. Still, he shielded her from fire and steel where he could. Nobody questioned Wanda’s tall, crimson shadow. Where she went, Vision inevitably followed.

He had overheard Rhodes speak jokingly, “That’s one hell of a shadow you got, Wanda.”

Wanda had smiled at his pleasantry and answered, only simply, “We have each other’s backs. That’s what teammates do.”

_I want to scream, but my lips have melted together in the shape of a smile._

There was small comfort in one of the laughter-filled nights in the Avengers shared. Steve had introduced the practice to them after simple bickering over directions of a mission became a fight between Rhodes and Sam. Steve had sat them all down at a table in the rec lounge of their home facility, a pail of ice and beer at its center.

Their leader, the great Captain America, with a number of colorful boxes in his arms, dropped upon the table before the seated Avengers team, several board games and announced, “Alright, Avengers. In lieu of some highly unnecessary bickering and sibling rivalries, I’m enacting a practice you kids don’t seem to carry on like we did in my day. Put your Get-Along shirts on, kids, it’s Family Night.”

Natasha cast a wary gaze at Rhodes. Rhodes shrugged and looked, with confusion, to Sam. Sam was nodding with an approving smile at Rogers. Rogers looked down upon the small family, fixing last on Wanda and Vision, who sat together at the far-west end of the table.

“We start with Monopoly.” He said.

Vision was not sure why half of the table groaned and slouched in their seats (although Miss Romanoff all too happily took the first beer from the pail, as wordless as ever,) but certainly, he was sure he saw some amusement in Wanda’s features.

She eyed the decorated cardboard that Steve unboxed with glee unusual to her features. Her eyes were sparkling. Wanda finally turned to Vision, grinning Cheshire, “This is going to be fun. I love board games!”

Vision felt himself smile in response, although he had entirely no idea what the objective of this team exercise meant to accomplish. It did not matter, though. It would only be twenty minutes and one beer each (even he indulged despite his prior negative experience with alcohol,) before tensions washed away and the Avengers shared the evening together as friends.

It would be thirty-four minutes and twelve seconds before Vision felt Wanda’s fingertips brush across his knuckles, between them.

Still laughing with Steve and Miss Romanoff about “the dog” game piece, she followed a conversation that Vision had steadily ceased to process.

Unnoticed by everyone else around them, she held his hand beneath the table, if only for a moment.

Wanda turned to him, smiling. She laughed more that night than he had ever seen.

_Your euphoria is my Valhalla._

The games came to their end as the night aged, and soon, the slightly-warmer family would go their separate ways for the night.

“You know… I think this may be the first time I’ve really seen your room. Outside of a dream. Or glancing in while walking by like a weirdo,” Wanda said, later that evening as she stepped into Vision’s room.

It was a stark contrast from her own, which had become more decorated with trinkets and tokens of memory in the recent months.

Where Wanda’s room was warm and smelled of incense, there was something sterile and unused about Vision’s dwelling—perhaps it lingered in the fact that he rarely ever spent time there outside of listening to quiet music when everyone slept.

Even his bed seemed largely unused. Occasionally he would let himself experience sleep in its sheets and tactile pleasantry, but often, he slept hovering three feet above the ground, standing sentinel, able to awake to combat should the need arise.

“Are you a light sleeper?” Wanda said, comfortably dropping onto a bed with neat linens and blankets. For he, and he alone, Wanda Maximoff’s grin was coquette.

Vision shook his head, “I don’t imagine so. I’ve yet to go into standby mode with serious interruption, however. I suppose if an evacuation drill happened to begin while I was experiencing REM sleep, I would find out if I am a light or a heavy sleeper.”

“I can’t picture you sleeping through that siren,” Wanda said, still eying him with intent he could not interpret.

Hopping off of the bed, Wanda neared him beside the small collection of records he had acquired. Standing next to him, she looked up with a quiet, but enthusiastic smile.

“What music do you like?”

Vision felt another one of those odd reflexive smiles come over his face as his fingertips crossed over the records, “…I am still figuring that out. But I suppose I like… jazz. Jazz and its varying sub-genres.”

“Classy.”

“…and you?”

Wanda glanced downward, letting her fingertips trace over the records, “Quiet music. Music I can meditate to… I don’t think I look for a certain style as much as I look for a certain feeling.”

“Elaborate on this feeling?”

Wanda’s lips straightened as she mulled over it in her mind and then she answered, “Music that sounds like dreaming.”

“That is quite the abstraction.”

A quiet laugh escaped Wanda as she nodded, “Yes, I guess it is.”

“You prefer things quiet.”

“Do you prefer them loud?”

Vision, although not requiring air, drew in a breath. Human subtleties and microexpressions were becoming a habit to him by this point, a second nature, even. To draw in a breath implied a pause in conversation, a hesitation. He felt himself hesitant to answer this. Perhaps the breath drawn in was from having a great weight momentarily nudged.

“I prefer things a pleasant volume.”

“…Vision, is there something on your mind?”

Vision caught her gaze. He could not tell if the emotion behind her crescent eyes was one of concern or indifference sometimes. It was different than the light behind them when their fingers intertwined beneath the table hours before, and it was different than the glow behind them when she trembled naked beneath him the nights prior. Both instances named were moments of warmth. This one was decidedly cold.

“I am not certain,” Vision answered honestly, “…I sense there is a weight upon myself. But it is not something my research has given much name to. I suppose it is a part of acclimating to human psychology. Growing pains, as it were.”

“Is it painful?” That cold gaze seemed to warm.

Vision thought about this and then with a slow nod, answered, “I… yes. I think so.”

“Does it have to do with… this?”

 _This_. Perhaps when put like that, it did.

“No.” Vision lied.

 “Your room… it’s a bit lonely, I think.” Wanda said, glancing around.

Vision felt a candle inside him was lit when she bit her lower lip and asked, “May I stay with you tonight? Here?”

They had spent several nights together since their encounter in her room, not counting trysts they had snuck into their days in between. This would be the first instance of her opting to follow _him_ rather than the other way around. It was a fact that did not go unnoticed by Vision. A fact that chipped away at that unseen weight that sought to crush him. A weight he could not yet quantify or understand. A sense of _waiting._

“Of course. Always. Any time you wish.” Vision spoke, half-expecting to stumble over his own words.

He adored her smile when he answered in the affirmative.

“…alright, then. But you’ll have to keep me warm when I fall asleep.”

“I would greatly enjoy that.”

“Viszh, you’re so…” Wanda trailed off, glancing sideward with that celestial smile. Finally, she glanced toward the records and said, “…will you show me your favorite music?”

In that evening, they listened to three records before she fell asleep in his arms, lying on his bed.

The first song that flickered to life was _“I’m A Fool to Want You”_ sung by Billie Holiday. Wanda listened, lying beside him, staring up at the ceiling.

“Viszh… do you think about things like life and death?” Wanda asked.

“Not particularly.”

Wanda gave a voiceless laugh and replied, “I imagined as much. I wonder sometimes if I am just… weird for thinking of so much. I couldn’t tell you if a normal human mind thinks of it as often as I do.”

“I don’t think about my own death as much as I think about those around me. Of Rogers. Of Rhodes. Of Mister Stark. I will inevitably witness their expiration before my own. It is upsetting.”

“Do you… think you’ll live forever?”

“I suppose we have the similarity in that we live until we die.”

“And so after. What do you think comes after? Or have you gotten that far in your studies?” Wanda had added the last sentence with some playfulness to her voice. Vision glanced back to her from the ceiling and was not sure how to answer.

“What comes after?” Vision repeated.

“What comes after.” Wanda confirmed.

“… _what_ comes after?” Vision felt, for a moment, a sinking sensation that perhaps mythology had some factual, scientific basis in a subsequent lifespan for which he would have to consider when he had not yet even come to understand his first.

“Nobody knows.” Wanda answered.

“So… perhaps nothing may come after.”

“Or perhaps everything.”

Was she playing a game?

“This is a realm of abstraction I’m having difficulty following.”

“I have a dream sometimes. That this isn’t the first time I’ve lived this life.” Wanda said, turning back up to eye the ceiling and it’s every little ripple. She raised one hand, soft red lights flickering around her fingers, “…sometimes I look at this and… I feel like it’s all happened before. Rogers said it’s called _déjà vu_ to most people. In Sokovia, we did not have a word for it. But I felt it. Long before I felt and saw these lights.”

Vision thought about the term. Déjà vu— _tedious familiarity,_ literally, _already seen_. French in origin. He watched Wanda’s face as she looked upon the lights dancing across her fingertips. He watched her eyes and her lashes and the crescent moons that were her irises.

“When I first saw you… before you… before you were born, I felt that _déjà vu_ , when I saw your skin and saw your face. That machine was still building you. But you were dreaming so many dreams. Not all of them your own. You were dreaming Ultron’s dreams at first, but at the same time, I… I think you were dreaming your own, too. You dreamt… about the sun heating your forehead.” Wanda trailed off and laughed, before facing him.

Vision felt some fondness inside of him, welling. An emotion he had not yet felt before. Grinning, he said, “I dreamt about the sun heating my forehead?”

“You dreamt about that.” Wanda nodded with a soft laugh, “strange and yet… it felt familiar. But here we are. Some cultures, they believe in a kind of life after death. That when we die, we don’t go to a heaven or a hell or a purgatory… but that we get born again in another life. From the beginning. I wonder what it was in your last life that had you dreaming about the sun beating down on your head like that.”

“Was it unpleasant?”

Wanda thought about this and then answered, “No. It was a gentle warmth. It felt like… it felt like holding my breath for a long time, but that warmth made me feel like I could breathe again. Strange. You have very strange dreams, Toaster.”

A laugh crossed his lips. He hadn’t realized until that moment that his arm had slipped around Wanda’s waist as her body against his chest moved closer. He could smell a soft, citrus scent in her hair. She turned, now, letting her own arm slip across his chest.

“This feels like that. Listening to this music and talking to you about this. I wonder, how many times have we done this before?”

“Those are questions I cannot even fathom an answer to.”

“Likewise,” Wanda sighed, “…but maybe it is human nature to wonder this.”

He realized then, that he had been so fixated on the present that he had not thought to question or even think much on the design beyond what a certain tunnel vision allotted him. Vision thought, for a second, to zoom out on the larger picture of possibility. But the possibility was infinite. It gave him a sense of fear. He opted against this. The present was safer.

“Wanda… why do you call me Toaster?”

Wanda was silent for a time before she answered, “I’m not sure. I feel like I heard someone call you that once. But… I guess… now that I think about it, I didn’t.”

“Is it affectionate?”

“Of course. Toaster.”

Their conversation persisted through the evening. He changed the record twice more until the third settled on Ennio Morricone. By the time Wanda had fallen asleep, Vision was alone with only the sound of, _“La Lucertola”_ coming from the record player.

The first blue after several weeks of the slate gray sheet that was the sky. She gazed upward for the clouds as winter transitioned into spring. Wanda could fly, now. At this point, by February, she was flying even all alone, having snuck away from their small unit with her constant and overpowering desire for solitude. The sky no longer frightened Wanda. Nor did falling.

She always returned to the earth. To their small family—and oh, how they fought to show her she was welcome, despite her penchant for slipping into corners. She always returned from the clouds and she always returned to him, be it in dreams when he slept (often alone, but occasionally, beside her when no one noticed) and always, she stole lust from him when need be and love when offered.

March of the year two-thousand and sixteen was his first experience with spring. Perhaps, had Wanda not been the first to show him the taste of the utmost beauty humans experienced, the spring itself would have been what indoctrinated him into reverence for the human experience. Skies were, one moment, cerulean and clear, and the other, stormy and black even in midday. Thunder and lightning entranced him—Wanda took amusement at the way Vision stood at the window, mesmerized by the flashing lights over the horizon—and the hail and gusts of April over the spreading green of the reborn earth enthralled him.

Should Wanda have been inevitably named his first love, spring on Earth would be inarguably the second.

“They are just flowers?” Wanda had said as they stepped out into the field following the rest of the Avengers shortly before their outdoor sparring period.

Vision’s gaze was torn between the emerald of the hills around their distant compound and the white of the small flowers speckling the grass, “Despite understanding what they are and why they are here, I cannot… I cannot stop looking at them.”

Wanda breathed a quiet chuckle, shaking her head, “I guess… this is your first time seeing seasons, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a bit sad how we take it for granted. I’ve seen almost nineteen springs and I can pinpoint exactly which one I first ignored. After that, I never really thought about the seasons unless a particularly beautiful day came along.” Wanda said.

He did not quite understand what about that had amused Romanoff so much, but the crimson-haired woman chuckled and continued walking with a gentle, “Nineteen springs, huh?”

Wanda was smiling as her eyes fixed on the grass. Golden-brown hair, carried on the breeze, rippled around her features like a tide pulled by the moon. Vision caught himself staring again.

To Romanoff, Wanda answered, “Almost nineteen. What is it Americans say? _Over the hill_?”

Both Steve and Romanoff laughed. Wanda was silent, but she smiled toward the flowers. She was happy to have made them laugh.

They spent that afternoon training together, and the evening, stealing off alone together in Vision’s room, enthralled in soft music and each other’s embrace. Each touch, each gasp, each shared sigh and light of ecstasy was still, painfully to Vision, their secret.

“So what are you guys, now?” Tony asked, catching Vision phasing through the wall of Wanda’s room one evening. Vision was startled by the sudden sensation of being “caught” and realized that this moment may be what broke the vow he had agreed upon with Wanda. That vow of secrecy. Dreadful, heavy, crushing secrecy.

Vision had been caught up in wishing Wanda a good night—having kissed her cheek and laying her slumbering body into her sheets. After slipping quietly from her room, he nearly bumped into Tony in the adjacent corridor.

Tony glanced at the wall Vision had just phased through and then glanced at Vision with an indiscernible sort of grin, “You’re hittin’ it, aren’t you? Oh. My. God.”

Vision shook his head quickly, “I… don’t understand this turn of phrase. It is violent and upsetting.”

With one hand on Vision’s back, Tony guided him along, heading out toward the midnight-silenced lounge area. Tony was visibly amused.

“So you did tell her, didn’t you?”

“Tell her… I…” Vision half stammered, half glanced sideward, “I… well, I guess in a word. Yes, I did. She is aware of how I feel about her.”

Tony stared him down again, face straight, intensely reading him in a way so damned obvious that was so distinctly Tony.

“So you’re hittin’ it. Wow. She _is_ weird. Hot.”

Vision’s eyes narrowed, feeling a prick of something cold inside, “I am not sure I _want_ to follow that thought process, but I believe I may have, for the first time in my life, felt offended.”

“Eeesh, alright. Easy there, Romeo. I won’t tell a soul. Like I said, scout’s honor.” Tony said, voice hushed. It was initially light, amused, but something about it sobered as his dark eyes turned groundward and then back toward the corridor from which they had come.

Lips straightening, Tony said, “I’m not going to say don’t go for it. We live a kind of life… where we may not always have a tomorrow. But others might not understand.”

 “Elaborate,” Vision replied, unamused by Tony.

It was only then that he caught wind of the lack of intent to amuse in Tony’s words. Continuing, the man said, “Protect her. If it’s what you feel is right. But foremost… protect yourself. People come and go, you know. Well,”—a scoff—“…you don’t know. Yet. But don’t get caught up in the idea that love is the purest, brightest side of humanity. It isn’t.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“I’m not sure you’d want to follow if you knew,” Tony said, before shifting more casually back toward his own path out of the lounge. Where their paths separated, Tony’s lodging was decidedly in the opposite direction of Vision’s. But before leaving, Tony asked again, “Like I said before, what are you guys, now? You know it, right? You’ve asked?”

“I… no. I suppose we may be lovers… if that is what follows the actions we’ve taken?”

Tony nodded, another expression on his face which Vision was categorically unfamiliar with. Something between amusement, regret, and… pity.

“Love. That’s nice.” Tony replied, “Be careful with that.”

“Is it dangerous?”

Tony stopped, back to Vision, having been caught just shy of escaping. One hand along the wall, Tony drummed his fingertips as he answered, “…incredibly. Maybe even the most dangerous weapon in the world, pardon my poetry here. It’s a bit corny, maybe, but… yeah. Humans die for it, kill themselves for it, go to war for it. Tell each other forever one moment and throw each other under the bus a minute later for it. Jeez, wow. You really want to take the full scope of being human, don’t you?”

Tony turned back to Vision now, no longer joking, no longer amused.

“Yes.”

“For science?” Tony asked.

Vision had to think about this question—what Tony meant by it. He was referring to something out of Vision’s course of thought and protocol at this point. An abstraction that, upon further analysis, implied the opposite of Vision’s want. However, the realization of which, that it was a complication humans imposed on one another in the pursuit of love, pulled at something within him in an uncomfortable way.

“For her.”

“Good answer.” Tony conceded, taking his leave, “Keep it between the two of you for now. Me and Maximoff… we may not get along all the time, but I don’t want to make her suffer any more than I already have, Vision. Protect her. But like I said. Protect yourself, first. She’s only human.”

_She’s only human._

As Tony strutted away, he sang aloud— _Jay and the Americans_ , _“…and when I told her, I didn’t love her anymore, she cried, she cried…”_

Vision realized then, that he had not dreamt of his marionette in weeks.

Another girl had caught his eye.

Flesh and blood and cloaked in scarlet, and when he kissed her, a kiss that in one life meant goodbye—this life meant, _“Hello, I love you.”_

“What do you know of past lives, Mister Stark?” Vision asked, approximately three days later.

They were sitting in Tony’s workshop, alone. Vision had been learning the structure of Tony’s latest suit, in the off-chance a second person would be needed for repairs on the field. Tony’s radio was playing that same song again— _She Cried._ It chased him.

Tony stared for a moment before shaking his head and repeating Vision’s words, “…I’m sorry, did you, the robot, just ask me about reincarnation? See, this is the sort of thing that made me quit drinking.”

“Forgive me.”

“No. No, don’t worry about it. Uh. Wow. Reincarnation. You’re really coming at me with the big questions, aren’t you, son? First girls, now existentialism. Okay. Cool. I was low-key one of those kids, too.” Tony shrugged and then said, “Reincarnation. Alright. Uh. Well, I don’t know about that, really. Never was that spiritual. Bounced around between atheism and agnosticism and had a pretty weird week in born-again Christianity but that was a very _weird_ week. Reincarnation. Uh… well, if it means we get another chance to not make the same dumb mistakes we always make, I feel like it’s pointless. We’ll always make the same dumb mistakes, because that’s what we do. That’s what humans do is make mistakes.”

“Will I make mistakes?”

“I hope not.”

The marionette was dissolving from his memory.

There was no more doll, no more graven image.

There was only Wanda. There was only the present.

“I told you once and I’ll tell you again. Don’t overthink it. Don’t dwell on it. We don’t have the science to dwell on it right now. Maybe Thor does up in Asgard, but. Us? We’re just mortal men. Even you, Viszh. We’re mortal men. Live for now. Live for today. Don’t beat yourself up over yesterday. Just try to make today and tomorrow better than yesterday.”

Better than yesterday.

Vision nodded. This was agreeable.

“Yes. This makes enough sense to me.”

This conversation occurred approximately thirty-seven days before the events of Lagos, Nigeria, April 4th, 2016.

A pursuit for a certain Brock Rumlow had lead to conflict in Lagos. A conflict that resulted in a great loss of life that Vision had only seen from Tony’s side in a laboratory five-thousand and two-hundred, seventy-nine miles away from Wanda.

The television blared with the screams caught on camera and the explosions of fire and gas lines in the building caught in one, Wanda Maximoff’s, line of fire.

Wanda was not among the casualties. But with the way she returned, pale of face, psychologically disemboweled, she explained, “I may as well have died with them.”

“It was a mistake. To err is human, Wanda.”

“No, Viszh,” Wanda was trembling, sitting on her bed, her unpacked bags untouched. She shook and tears spilled over her cheeks for the first time since the first weeks she had arrived in the Avengers facility, nearly a year ago.

Wanda shook her head and visibly sought the words to explain her sensations.

Vision waited.

“Each person who died up there, because of me… I felt it. I felt each life ending like candles getting snuffed out under my own fingers. I… I felt so sick. I still feel sick. I… It’s all my fault…”

“It’s not your fault.”

Vision spoke these words, but he knew it was a lie.

Causality dictated as much—lives were lost due to Wanda’s actions.

And yet he felt a nonsensical lack of a certain something. A want for justice, perhaps. That want was not there. There was only concern for Wanda. Selfish, solipsistic concern for Wanda. It was a dirty trait that did not go unnoticed to himself.

Psychically, Vision felt he was beginning to rust.

Wanda broke down. She fell to her knees before her bedside and she cried.

Vision watched her and felt a distinct sensation of being lost.

“They shouldn’t have died! I was so stupid, I shouldn’t have, I shouldn’t have…!” Wanda sobbed. Her sobs grew uncharacteristically loud, “Nobody deserved to die, they shouldn’t have died! I’m so stupid!”

He was not there. Five thousand and two-hundred, seventy-nine miles had separated them.

He should have been there. If those people may not have died. If Wanda would have not cried.

He did not close the distance between them, but he stayed with her, until her tears stopped.

“Wanda…” Vision breathed, finally, gazing upon her swollen eyes and parted lips. Dust in the air shone in a ray of light coming through her window. Wanda was silent now, staring into nothing. She did not speak to him, not then, nor for the rest of the evening.

“Wanda?” He repeated.

No answer.

She did not answer him for hours.

No equation came to logical sense—no action seemed to produce a favorable outcome.

An image came to mind as he floated two feet above the floor of Wanda’s bedroom, near a corner, like a sentinel ghost, in silence. An image from a painting Tony had dug out of his storage and promptly donated away. The painting itself was of a clergyman, clad in black and cassock, praying in a burning church.

“…I am paralyzed by inaction. Forgive me.” Vision said.

_Praying._

“Just go away.”

Vision would not go against her request.

He had never gone against her requests before, when all _he_ wanted was to scream to every atom of matter in existence that he loved her, Wanda Maximoff, and that he could make Wanda Maximoff _smile_.

He wanted to scream it so damned loud that the definition joy itself would be rewritten in the frequency of his words.

But he abided by her request for silence. Just as abided her request to be alone.

“Of course.”

It hurt every bit as much as Wanda Maximoff’s first request.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, boy.
> 
> Boy, oh, boy.
> 
> I think I'm going to include a playlist with the next chapter.
> 
> As always, you guys, thank you so much for reading and I'm always so thrilled to hear you're enjoying the trip so far (let me tell you, this is probably the funnest thing I've written in a Good Long While.) There is little more distance to cross from here. I'd say the ending may come around a certain chapter nine or ten, but we'll see how it goes. 
> 
> Vision's love will not go quietly.


End file.
